by James Parks, Jun 14, 2010
Hundreds of hotel workers and community allies protested in front of Hyatt’s first annual shareholder meeting last week in Chicago and in simultaneous demonstrations in Vancouver, Honolulu, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The protesters are outraged that despite increases in the hotel chain’s revenue and share prices, Hyatt is cutting staff and squeezing workers with more work and lower pay. All this at a time that Hyatt’s majority stockholders, the Pritzker family, cashed out more than $900 million as part of Hyatt’s initial public offering last November.
Four hundred workers at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco are out on strike and the protests in Chicago come just days after hundreds of workers at the Hyatt Regency Chicago walked off the job to draw attention to the worsening working conditions at Chicago’s largest downtown hotel. In the San Francisco area, more than 9,000 workers, members of UNITE HERE! have been working without a contract since August 2009 at several Hyatts.
