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 Labor Pains
How should meeting planners deal with hotel union disputes?
By Maria Lenhart
Last fall, Hawaii nearly lost its biggest citywide convention of the season when the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans (IFEBP) considered cancelling its conference in Waikiki because of unresolved contract disputes between Unite Here Local 5 and the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
With Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle and members of the hospitality industry lobbying hard to save the conference, which represented 28,000 room nights and an estimated $40 million to the local economy, the meeting went forward. However, one of its unscheduled events included a rousing takeover of the Hilton lobby and street protest by union workers, with some IFEBP attendees joining in to show support.
 While Waikiki has been a hot spot for hotel union activity in recent months, cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, Boston and others have all been witness to unrest stemming from an unusually high number of unsettled union contracts this year. While some major long-running disputes have recently been resolved, including those at the Hilton Hawaiian Village as well as Hilton properties in San Francisco and Chicago and six Starwood hotels in Hawaii, others remain.
Why is 2011 unusually ripe for hotel union activity? According to Annemarie Strassel, director of communications for Unite Here, a union representing about 100,000 hotel workers at over 900 hotels in the U.S. and Canada, the recession of the past two years played a major role, with many hotels citing financial hardship as a reason to not incur increased costs for wages and benefits.
"What's happening is that a bunch of hotel contracts began expiring in 2009 and 2010," she says. "Normally we can settle contracts near to the expiration dates, but because of the recession the hotel industry has been reluctant to make concessions. So the length of negotiations has been more... Read More...
Protecting Your Meeting
Much like acts of nature, labor disputes at hotels and other venues pose a threat to meetings, particularly for organizations with policies against crossing picket lines. If planners are to avoid hefty cancellation or attrition fees, negotiation experts say contracts need to address potential union activity just as they would a hurricane or anything else that could derail the meeting.
For planners such as Patrick McLaughlin, conference chairman for the Association of Administrative Law Judges, including labor dispute provisions in a hotel contract's force majeure clause—a clause designed to indemnify organizations
... Read More...
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