Dive Brief:
- Workers at four Boston hotels walked off the job Thursday in the latest wave of hotel strikes, according to hospitality union Unite Here.
- Affected hotels are at Omni Hotels & Resorts’ Omni Parker House and Omni Boston Seaport and the Marriott International properties Renaissance Boston Seaport and Westin Boston Seaport.
- The walkouts are the latest in Unite Here’s nationwide, multiphase strikes. Another set of Boston hotels walked out last week for a limited-duration strike that ended a few days later. This wave of strikes will last three days.
Dive Insight:
Some 2,000 hotel employees are now on strike in the U.S., including workers at Hilton San Diego Bayfront who walked out Sept. 1 and have elected to strike until their contract demands are met, according to Unite Here.
Negotiations “remain unresolved” in all the cities where strikes have been authorized or have already occurred, the union said. That means strikes could begin — or resume — at any time in Baltimore; Honolulu and Kauai, Hawaii; Greenwich and New Haven, Connecticut; Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose, California; Providence, Rhode Island; and Seattle.
“Hotel workers are going to keep up the fight until hotels respect us and our guests,” Gwen Mills, Unite Here’s international president, said in a statement.
Omni told Hotel Dive that services at its hotels are not interrupted and that it is “committed to bargaining in good faith to reach a contract agreeable to all parties.” Marriott confirmed that the Renaissance Boston Seaport Hotel remains open and that the company remains “available to continue to negotiate a fair contract.”
Marriott declined to comment on the status of Westin Boston Seaport as it is operated by a third-party management company.
More than 40,000 hotel employees across the U.S. and Canada are negotiating new work contracts this year. Workers are seeking wages that better keep up with the rising cost of living, safer working conditions and reversals of pandemic-era staffing cuts.
