It’s rare for a company with workers targeted by Big Labor for unionization to ask the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a unionization election. That initiative is usually taken by the unions themselves.
But that’s exactly what hotel chain Hyatt did at four of its locations after Unite Here organizers allegedly badgered its workers by showing up at their houses and following them to places like supermarkets in order to pressure them to unionize. Unite Here is a labor union that represents various service industry workers, including workers employed at hotels, airports, food service providers and casinos. Unite Here doesn’t want to hold secret-ballot elections, though, despite leading numerous activities Hyatt contends are tantamount to organizing efforts.
Over the past few years, Hyatt says Unite Here has asked for payroll audits, demanded modifications in Hyatt’s employee health benefits plan, “wrongfully taken credit” for improvements in wages and working conditions, and filed complaints with the Department of Labor’s office of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Hyatt also said that the union has “misled” hotel guests about working conditions at its hotels. Hyatt says those activities and others should be enough to show Unite Here is trying to organize workers at those locations, and that they should be the equivalent of a union request for an election. But regional offices for the NLRB rejected Hyatt’s requests for unionization elections at all four locations in question: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; Long Beach, Calif.; Santa Clara, Calif.; and Indianapolis, Indiana.
Hyatt’s chief human resources officer, Rob Webb, told The Daily Caller the reason Hyatt asked the NLRB for secret-ballot elections was so workers could once-and-for-all decide whether or not they want Unite Here to represent them. “The employees have been telling us that there have been visits to their homes in the evening from delegations from Unite Here,” Webb said. “We understand there have been instances where they [Hyatt employees] go grocery shopping, and folks [from the union] kind of going into the store and walk with them into the parking lot to talk them into joining the union. We also know at these four properties they’ve been contacting customers of the hotel to try to dissuade them from coming to the hotel sort of to put pressure, presumably, on us.”
Webb said that, from his perspective, the union organizers are acting like they represent the employees at those four hotels when they really don’t.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce labor specialist Glenn Spencer told TheDC this is yet another example of unions using the NLRB, which has recently come under fire from Republicans for being too friendly to labor unions instead of being a neutral arbiter, to boost organizing efforts and grow their ranks. Spencer added that this process has been a bit of trend since Democrats failed to pass their Employee Free Choice Act, or card-check legislation, last Congress. Card-check is when union leaders get workers to sign a card signaling their support for an election for unionization – but, what labor organizers often fail to tell workers is that, if enough workers sign cards, the union can forgo the election process and assume representation of the workers automatically.
Spencer said unions still use card-check organizers as an organizing process as long as they can get a company’s corporate leadership to agree to it. The pressure campaign that is being used against Hyatt is a tactic, Spencer said, unions use to force companies into agreeing to card-check instead of a secret ballot election.
“Usually, the union would ask for it [the secret-ballot election],” Spencer said in a phone interview. “But, in this case, because of all the various tactics that Unite Here has been using, in the view of Hyatt, well they’re saying they [the union] are clearing wanting to represent our employees, so let’s just have the election. The union opposed that – they didn’t want to have the actual election.”
Unite Here spokeswoman Annemarie Strassel told TheDC that the union thinks an election at this point in time wouldn’t be “fair or neutral” because the company has not been vocally neutral on the matter of unionization.
“I think that [an election] is something that we’re open to discussing with the company, but the most important aspect is that the company agreed to remain neutral and simply allow the workers to decide for themselves what is in their best interests and Hyatt has refused to remain neutral,” Strassel said in a phone interview. “Hyatt management has been vocally anti-union.”
When asked by TheDC for specific examples of Hyatt’s failure to remain neutral, Strassel failed to provide any.