Abstract

"We Always Had a Union: New York’s Hotel Workers Unions, 1912-1953"

Shaun Richman, SUNY Empire State University (shaun.richman@sunyempire.edu)

Taking their cue from the Waldorf-Astoria at the turn of the 20th century, luxury hotels exclusively hired waiters who could at least speak French, German and English for a cosmopolitan flair and insisted “that every order is obeyed with military discipline.” Far from a school of Americanization, they inadvertently recruited a workforce that was impatient for world revolution. Workers launched two industry-wide strikes in 1912 and 1913, with radical leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Other historians have noted that the independent union wound up affiliating with historically craft-oriented AFL unions in the 1930’s, a time when one might expect them to find the CIO a better match. The transition from the IWW to the AFL can be explained by their leaders’ embrace of the Communist Party.

The radicals were welcomed into the AFL’s Hotel Employees in 1936 and organized tens of thousands of hotel and restaurant workers into the union. But they did it in astonishing and confounding ways. Forming the New York Hotel Trades Council as a coalition of AFL craft unions they made good and regular use of New York State’s labor-management mediators and conciliatory bureaucracy. They incorporated a form of tripartite dispute settlement into a collective bargaining agreement that endures to this day. They formed a labor-management partnership with the Hotel Association that replaced predatory employment agencies with an industry employment office and seniority and job protections. As they negotiated successor agreements wages continued to rise, pensions were won and health care benefits took the form of a miniature system of socialized medicine with group practice health care clinics run by the union and the Association.

The union’s Communist leadership was not purged; they broke with the Party but did not fundamentally alter their worldview or approach to unions. Today, New York’s hotel workers unions have a conservative reputation that is belied by their militant track record of quickie strikes, work-to-rule job actions and marches on the boss–while the Industry Wide Agreement is in effect–and long-term strikes to win the IWA for new properties.