Quilt dramatizes housekeepers’ stories

[dcsmart]

SAN FRANCISCO - Held aloft by hotel workers and community supporters, the Hope Quilt stretched down the block from the Grand Hyatt hotel's entrance on a sunny October afternoon. Its colorful squares carried the stories of the housekeepers - mostly women - who clean and prepare the country's myriad hotel rooms every day and the struggles they face as they lift heavy mattresses and cope with growing mounds of fancy bedding, often suffering crippling injuries in the process.

Though San Francisco hotel workers and their union, Unite Here Local 2, are negotiating with several hotel chains for a new citywide contract covering some 9,000 workers, hundreds of them gathered at the Grand Hyatt Oct. 7 for a reason.

"At our daily morning meeting Aug. 31 they told us to come to a mandatory meeting that afternoon," Gisela Romero, a former housekeeper at the Hyatt Harborside at Boston's Logan Airport, told the World. "There, the general manager and other managers said that because the economy was so bad, they were eliminating the entire housekeeping department. We said, you can't do that! Everyone started to cry; a pregnant woman almost collapsed."

Earlier in the summer, Romero said, the hotel chain had told housekeepers at three Boston-area Hyatts to start training workers the hotel had contracted through Hospitality Staffing Solutions of Georgia. Management said the new workers would be their vacation replacements.

Then 98 workers - non-union and mostly immigrant women - discovered their jobs, paying up to $16/hour, were being taken over by workers paid half that much.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://www.peoplesworld.org/quilt-dramatizes-housekeepers-stories/

[bobburgster]

1. Very sad!

Nothing like double punching those that are the most vulnerable. Bet the GM goes to church every Sunday to pray for the betterment of mankind too.

[Omaha Steve]

2. K&R!