Luxury hotel profits on backs of low-paid workers, union charges

As dozens of supporters marched Thursday in frigid temperatures outside the Minneapolis Grand Hotel, leaders of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 17 charged management with profiting at the expense of low-paid workers.

“This hotel caters to the wealthiest people in our community” yet pays low wages to many of its workers, said Jaye Rykunyk, principal officer of Local 17. “This hotel continues to take advantage of the poorest of the poor.”

HERE Local 17 members and supporters marched outside the Minneapolis Grand Hotel Thursday.

For the past two years, Local 17 has attempted to negotiate a contract covering the 40 workers at the hotel, who include housekeeping staff and laundry workers. It has filed 10 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, charging the hotel management with bad faith bargaining, illegal interrogation of workers, coercion, discrimination against union employees and interference with workers’ exercise of their federally protected rights.

Bargaining has broken off and the union is escalating a campaign to put public pressure on the hotel. The demonstration, which included representatives of the AFL-CIO, many unions and the community, was part of that effort.

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“We are going to make this a high-visibility public campaign and we are going to bring this employer to his knees,” said Local 17 President Bill McCarthy.

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The Rev. Doug Mork, a member of the Twin Cities Religion Labor Network, said the hotel has a moral obligation to improve the standard of living for its employees.

“It is often in the workplace where our values meet our lives . . .” Mork told the crowd. “We believe the kind of disrespect shown to workers by the Grand Hotel management . . . has been corrosive to the community.”

Also speaking was Mike Scharlepp, a Grand Hotel employee who said he was recently fired because of his union activity. “I helped set up the hotel” before it opened in July 2000, he said. “I see a real lack of respect for the employees.”

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For more information

Visit the Local 17 website: http://www.here17.org

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