Abstract
In late June 2023, UNITE HERE Local 11—the hospitality workers union—staged an act of civil disobedience in which more than two hundred people were arrested for blocking the entrance to the Los Angeles International Airport. 1 Days later, workers at over sixty hotels across Southern California began a series of rolling walk-outs as part of the largest hotel strike in modern U.S. history. Despite steady wage gains and improved benefits, housing costs were rising exponentially, and incomes were not keeping up. Workers demanded significant immediate raises. 2 Coinciding with historic strikes among screenwriters, actors, and auto workers, the Southern California hotel workers’ campaign is but part of a growing wave of labor militancy nationally. 3
Indeed, after decades of declining unionization, recent high-profile strikes and organizing drives, as well as polls showing historic levels of support for unions, have reinvigorated the labor movement. But despite the on-the-ground action, union density in the private sector remains historically low. The difficulty of newly organized Amazon and Starbucks workers, among others, in winning first contracts, reminds us just how hard it is to solidify victories, given our ossified federal labor law, with its byzantine workplace-by-workplace election and bargaining rules, toothless enforcement, and endless delays. 4 Given these obstacles, how can the surge of interest in organizing translate into sustainable gains and power for workers?
We contend that the recent history of UNITE HERE—and of its second largest local, UNITE HERE Local 11, representing hotel and food service workers in Southern California and Arizona—offers at least a partial answer. In the context of a persistent decline in union density nationally, between 2010 and 2020, Local 11 more than doubled its membership and now represents 32,500 workers. In relative terms, it is not a large union. But, as Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large at The American Prospect, has put it, the local has played a “decisive role” both in local politics and, by organizing a largely immigrant workforce, in the broader transformation of the labor movement. “If ever a union punched above its weight,” he observed in 2019, “it’s Local 11.” 5
There are many examples of how Local 11 has done this. Here, we focus on one: the union’s transformation of the city of Santa Monica into a regional organizing and progressive policy laboratory, dramatically raising standards by organizing the bulk of the hotel sector and enacting pro-worker legislation, which it then spread throughout the region. As Jane McAlevey argues—and as we show—there are “no shortcuts” to revitalizing the labor movement. 6 But deep, sustained, resourced, bottom-up organizing to build a dedicated structure of worker leaders—and a broader community, with faith leaders, elected officials, and others committed to supporting them—can achieve high levels of union density and transform local politics and policy. If the labor movement can replicate this, particularly in “red” and “purple” regions—as Local 11 has been doing in Orange County, California, and Maricopa County, Arizona—we can begin to envision a world in which major federal labor law reform is finally attainable. But, as we contend, the organizing must come first.
Building Working-Class Organization: The Worker Committee Model
The modern history of Local 11 (and of UNITE HERE more broadly) began in New Haven, Connecticut, where a small Local representing service, custodial, and culinary workers at Yale University transformed the organizing culture of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE). In the 1960s and 1970s, against the background of constant labor conflict between the university administration and unionized maintenance and food service workers, a radical and outspoken labor leader named Vincent Sirabella emerged. A child of the Depression, Sirabella worked as a dishwasher and server in his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, before becoming an officer of Local 217 in New Haven by the end of the 1950s.
Sirabella resisted the business unionism tendency of his time which viewed unions mainly as organizations seeking to meet their goals solely through collective bargaining. Instead, he insisted on the necessity of building strong worker organizing committees and member leadership. He argued that all power flowed from a worker-led organizing committee: “The organizer organizes the committee, and the committee organizes the workers.” Committee members are empowered to play crucial roles in the life of the union as representatives and agents of the organization. They communicate broader union strategies to their coworkers, whom they galvanize to action, and they listen to their coworkers’ concerns, which they convey back to the union leadership. At the same time, Sirabella argued for a link between workers and the community and pursued relationships with elected leaders and grassroots organizations. 7
Sirabella recruited two young organizers influenced by civil rights activism and the militant Yale strikes, John Wilhelm and Karl Lechow. In turn, they extended Sirabella’s commitments to rank-and-file leadership and spread this approach to union campaigns and strategy among HERE locals across the country, including in Southern California.
Three thousand miles away, a rank-and-file revolt in Los Angeles was a long time coming. By the late 1980s, Local 11’s leadership had become out of touch with the union’s increasingly Latinx membership. The office closed before hotel housekeepers got off work, materials were not translated into Spanish, contracts were negotiated with little member participation, and organizers were absent from the workplace. 8 The child of farm workers, María Elena Durazo rose from organizer to union-side attorney to Local 11 president. She called on the HERE International Union to trustee the Local and, in the process, transformed the organization.
With other immigrant labor leaders—including her husband Miguel Contreras—Durazo reshaped the face of organized labor in Southern California by drawing on lessons from the United Farm Workers (UFW). She was also trained in the HERE organizing committee model developed by Sirabella and exported by Wilhelm and Lechow. 9
Under her new leadership, Local 11 waged increasingly aggressive battles with employers, engaging a wide repertoire of tactics—from Cesar Chavez’s strategy of hunger strikes to Reverend James Lawson Jr.’s methods of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience—to pressure the hospitality industry, and that boosted worker confidence. 10 These strategies drew public attention to union battles with employers, including a creative campaign to organize workers at the New Otani Hotel (which succeeded only many years later); and a successful fight to stop subcontracting at the University of Southern California. 11
Like Sirabella, Durazo sought to link worker power with political and community power. Other Lechow-trained organizers, including now co-president Susan Minato and former staff director Jennifer Skurnik, joined her in this effort. The union promoted immigrant rights legislation and sought to create bridges between immigrant and Black workers to build working-class power. In 1993, the union helped found the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a non-profit worker advocacy center that also became a policy incubator and “mobilizer of the public.” 12 LAANE would partner with the union on dozens of fights for pro-worker legislation. Durazo also focused on local races for city council, deploying worker leaders in door-to-door canvassing and voter mobilization. This, she recalled, “was a huge change that had not happened before” and led to electing pro-worker representatives to office and ushering in pro-worker legislation and job security protection, in addition to providing critical confidence to workers. 13
The union got a key boost in 1996 when, thanks in part to a canvassing army of HERE and SEIU members, Miguel Contreras was appointed president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, becoming the first person of color to hold the position. His election had also been hastened by widespread mobilizations of immigrant workers and their supporters against California’s 1994 Proposition 187, which sought to bar undocumented immigrants from public services, including education. 14
Under Contreras’ leadership, the “Fed” (as it is referred to locally) made significant investments in helping immigrants become naturalized and eligible to vote. It also recognized that even if the workers who were canvassing could not themselves vote, they could mobilize neighbors who could. Thousands of hospitality workers, janitors, and others took to the streets, leading to an unprecedented number of victories for labor-backed candidates. In 2005, Harold Meyerson described this phenomenon as “the most astonishing and significant civic transformation in recent American history.” 15
A parallel transformation took root at other HERE locals in the region, first in Santa Monica, where a new generation of organizers trained in the “worker committee” model transformed a moribund HERE local (Local 814) into an organizing union, and later in Orange County, where a young rank-and-file leader from Nicaragua, Ada Briceño, would lead a revolution to revitalize her own local (Local 681) and go on to help transform local politics in the notoriously red region. 16 By the mid-2000s, the locals would merge into Local 11. A similar story has unfolded in Arizona, where a smaller Phoenix-based local rejuvenated in the same aggressive organizing tradition (Local 631) merged with Local 11 in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and played a critical role in swinging the state blue in recent federal elections. 17
Victory at Miramar: A Prototype for the Future
In 1995, the five-star hotel Fairmont Miramar was the only unionized hotel in Santa Monica. The decades-old contract was inadequate: low wages, minimal benefits, and no practice respecting seniority. Worst of all, the hotel was an “open shop,” meaning that employees in bargaining unit positions were not required to become union members. As a result, only twelve of the hotel’s two hundred workers were dues-paying members. Dozens were circulating a petition to decertify the union as their representative. 18
Finding the incumbent Local 814 leadership floundering and the local’s membership dwindling, HERE’s International Union ordered Local 814 into trusteeship and appointed Tom Garcia Walsh, recently hired by Sirabella, to head the Local. Walsh worked with new organizing director Kurt Petersen, a Yale Law School graduate, who had organized farm workers with the UFW in Washington State. To identify and develop leaders, Petersen and other organizers and workers went on scores of house visits, meeting workers in their homes to hear their workplace complaints, offer a plan for improving conditions through collective action, and committing them to participate in those actions. 19
The organization of workers and community members they built was crucial to the confrontational actions needed to win fights with employers. Community alliances grew in part out of preexisting networks and coalitions, including Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR), a group formed in the 1970s that had passed a strong rent control ordinance, and LAANE. Worker leaders began carrying out frequent “delegations” to hotel management, in which a group of workers physically gathered at the workplace at an agreed-upon time during the workday and sought out a member of hotel management to communicate a complaint or demand. The delegations generated momentum and taught workers and community members alike the power of collective action.
Meanwhile, Petersen and Walsh engaged local community groups and elected officials to support worker actions, increase pressure on management, and give workers the confidence to push ahead. These community groups, including SMRR, LAANE, and some faith groups, in turn became steadfast allies in the workers’ fight for a union. 20
After a grueling five-year fight, Local 814 defeated the decertification through worker organizing, legally challenging Miramar’s unlawful conduct, and working closely with community organizations and elected officials.
After the Miramar victory, organizers seized on the concept of geographical organizing, the idea that union density matters not only in an industry or region but also in a particular community. The union focused its concerted efforts on building union density in Santa Monica, and when workers from nearby hotels heard about the Miramar victory and approached the union, organizers took advantage of the growing momentum. 21
The union also repurposed and reconfigured the strategy Local 814 had honed during the Miramar strike that became the prototype for campaigns that followed: worker-led committees closely collaborating with community groups, including LAANE. In 1996, during the Miramar fight, Local 814 and LAANE formed a new organization called Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism (SMART) to build policy and activism in Santa Monica. SMART quickly became a broad coalition: initially composed of community leaders (some of whom were also in SMRR) and clergy, it grew to encompass lawyers, law students, educators, college students, and workers focused on economic inequality and issues facing low-wage workers. Its community mobilization in support of striking hotel workers—through rallies, community events and open-air meetings, and door-knocking—and its lobbying for progressive policies and city council members would be critical to several collaborative campaigns. 22
SMART, like LAANE, also allied with Local 814 and SMRR to elect progressive candidates who would support the union and its campaigns. In July 2001, these organizations helped pass a living wage ordinance of $10.69 an hour plus health benefits of $2.50 an hour for the city’s Coastal Zone employers that was finally implemented in 2005. Responding to massive layoffs in the fallout of September 11, they also campaigned to win a right of recall to ensure hotels could not replace workers when business resumed.
Workers were the leaders in these policy campaigns and in hotel unionization drives. Most were immigrant women hotel housekeepers bearing the brunt of poor working conditions and low wages. In November 2000, Pacific Shores Hotel (later known as the Viceroy) became the first new union hotel in Santa Monica in more than fifty years, using a card check strategy rather than holding an NLRB election. 23 After winning the Viceroy, the Delfina hotel also won unionization through a card check, which was challenged and pushed into an ultimately successful election. Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel announced in December 2002, a “neutrality pact,” which enabled workers to unionize. 24
Using its worker-led committee strategy, Local 814 followed this victory by expanding efforts to organize workers at the Doubletree and Sheraton Four Points hotels. Over the next several years, Local 814, which had worked informally with Local 11 for several years, merged with Local 11 in 2003. Now Local 11 represents workers at hotels with 70 percent of all guest rooms in Santa Monica.
Pro-Worker Legislative Victories
The union’s growth and density in Santa Monica has allowed it to play a leading role in increasing organizing efforts and supporting legislation that advanced the interests of low-wage workers and tenants. In 2016, the union campaigned for the Santa Monica City Council to adopt a hotel minimum wage designed to align with Los Angeles’ wage rate (itself the project of a multi-year Local 11 campaign) and a general minimum wage that would start at $10.50 and reach $15.00 per hour by July 2020 (and keep pace with inflation thereafter), as well as model protections for sick leave and protections against a form of tip theft through service charges. 25 Among other examples, in response to campaigns by the union and its allies, the city has also enacted a law to protect tenants from displacement by short-term rental companies like Airbnb that is a model for the country. 26
More recently, the union has won a pathbreaking “Housekeeper Bill of Rights.” The law instituted “panic buttons” for room attendants who face a well-established pattern of harassment in the workplace. 27 It also requires that hotels provide premium pay to housekeepers who clean more than a specified number of square feet during their shift to ensure fair pay and prevent management from increasing housekeeper quotas, as it had at a non-union hotel in Santa Monica following the 2016 wage increase. In addition, the law includes model “worker retention” provisions protecting hotel workers’ jobs in the event their hotel changed ownership or subcontracted operations, and a requirement that hotels contract with an independent organization to train hotel workers in their legal rights. 28
Santa Monica housekeepers drove this year-long policy campaign, meeting with city council members and flooding city hall meetings wearing red UNITE HERE t-shirts to call for the law’s passage. The hotel industry fought back, bringing to city council meetings lobbyists and workers from non-union hotels. Finally, on August 27, 2019, after a tense meeting with an overflow crowd that went past 1:00 a.m., the city council voted to pass the law as proposed, to an eruption of cheers. 29
As part of broader community organizing programs, the union has successfully exported many of the laws it first won or won in their strongest form in Santa Monica to other locales. Laws modeled on Santa Monica’s Housekeeper Bill of Rights have been adopted in Los Angeles, Glendale, West Hollywood, and Irvine. 30 Long Beach passed a similar ordinance shortly before Santa Monica’s was finalized, and Anaheim is currently considering such a law, amid fierce opposition from hotels. 31
Perhaps of greatest impact, at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the union was able to win passage of the right-of-recall law—pioneered in Santa Monica in the wake of 9/11—in cities throughout the region and the state of California. 32 The law guarantees laid-off hospitality workers the right to return to their jobs or similar positions in order of company seniority as business returns. These laws have protected the jobs of hundreds of thousands of laid-off workers and have led to multi-million-dollar penalties for companies failing to comply. 33
An Enduring Model for California and Beyond
As we write these words in late 2023, Local 11 appears to be on the cusp of a historic breakthrough. Following more than 100 raucous strikes across Southern California hotels this summer and fall, Hilton and other major hotels have reached tentative agreements with the union that, once ratified, will dramatically raise wages—with room attendant rates increasing by 40 percent over the four-year contract—while maintaining free family healthcare and strengthening a defined benefit pension plan. The agreements also include new protections for immigrant workers, strong diversity commitments, and measures to assist formerly incarcerated people in getting jobs at unionized hotels.
The contract fight of 2023 and the remarkable outcome it is poised to deliver could not have been achieved without the bottom-up, geographic organizing model pioneered in Santa Monica. Over the past several decades, Local 11 has deployed this approach in other areas in the region: downtown Los Angeles, the corridor near LAX, Long Beach, and more recently Hollywood, West Hollywood, and various cities in Orange County, as well as Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding cities. This decades-long project has developed an organization of worker leaders capable of carrying out the massive strikes and picket lines we have seen this year.
As the highs of 2023’s “hot labor summer” (and fall and winter) reverberate through workplaces across industrial sectors, we would do well to remember that a revitalized labor movement capable of defeating the robber barons of modern industry will not be built overnight. When frustration grows, many will look to the long-promised panacea of major federal labor law reform, which has for too long resembled Charlie Brown’s football—sometimes tantalizingly close but always swept out of reach.
To be sure, we agree that labor law reform will likely be crucial for the labor movement’s future in the long term. 34 But Local 11’s experience suggests a path forward in the here and now: in Santa Monica and other cities in Southern California, the union has demonstrated that it is possible to wage workplace-by-workplace organizing campaigns that over time achieve high enough union density and worker militancy to markedly improve wages and working conditions across the region through collective bargaining. And while doing so, the union has organized the surrounding communities to transform the local political environment and win innovative pro-worker legislation, demonstrating that—despite the NLRA’s broad preemptive reach—there remains significant space to raise the floor on which bargaining takes place through laws establishing minimum labor standards. The prerequisite for both types of change—and ultimately for durably changing federal labor law—is a large structure of experienced worker leaders, trained through the trials of hard fights, who are willing and capable of organizing their communities, one door and one conversation at a time.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
