New York hotels yesterday ratified a tentative six-year contract with the New York Hotel Trades Council, a group of nine unions representing 23,000 employees, according to a news release from the Hotel Association of New York. The contract will be voted on by union membership on Thursday and is expected to be approved.
The new contract, which offers wage increases and better benefits, covers 133 hotels in New York, including hotels managed and/or owned by Marriott International Inc., Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and InterContinental Hotels Group, but does not include two major hotels owned by Hilton Hotel Corp. Negotiations for these two properties are being held separately.
The ratification of the new contract before the old one expires (June 30) bodes well for other destinations facing negotiations with hotel unions. These include hotels in Hawaii, where contracts expire at the end of this month, and hotels in Boston and Los Angeles, where contracts end in November.
However, the contract negotiated in New York did not involve the contentious issue of “card-check neutrality,” which the Unite Here hotel workers’ union has been pushing in other cities. This is a method of unionizing a hotel in which the union polls workers and a hotel is unionized if a majority favors it, as opposed to the method favored by employers, in which workers cast secret ballots.
