I'm so glad you have a ba$tion of corporate liberali$m like the Boston Globe looking out for you:
"Hospitality union recruits African-American workers" by Katie Johnston | Globe Staff September 11, 2014
Bobby Oliver juggles three part-time jobs to make ends meet – cooking hamburgers and sausages at Fenway Park during baseball season, working the grill for Celtics and Bruins games at TD Garden, and preparing meals at Suffolk University throughout the school year.
A stretch of away games can wreak havoc on his paycheck.
But this month, fresh out of a new hospitality training program for African-American workers, Oliver, 49, will start a full-time union job as a banquet cook at the Westin Boston Waterfront, with better pay and benefits to support his children and opportunities to move into a front desk or supervisory position. Oliver said he often sees black workers from other countries in stable union jobs — Haitians, Nigerians, Somalis — and wonders where all the African-Americans are.
“Now I feel like it’s my turn,” he said. “It’s like, wow, something for us.”
The training program is the central component of an effort by Unite Here Local 26, the hospitality workers’ union, to reach out to the African-American community to fill jobs that offer good wages and benefits. The initiative aims to expand the diversity of hotel workforces, increasingly dominated by immigrants, and meet the growing demand in the industry for employees who are fluent in English.
It is also part of a broader movement among local unions to add more people of color to their ranks and help address high rates of joblessness in minority and low-income communities. Unemployment among blacks in Massachusetts last year was 10.6 percent, compared to 6.6 percent for whites, and 7 percent for all workers, according to the Labor Department. The overall rate has since fallen.
Local 26 is taking a progressive approach to dealing with the economic disparities facing African-Americans, said Tito Jackson, a Boston councilor who used his connections with the black community to recruit trainees for the program.
“There is a very long history of African-American workers in that industry, but as of late we have seen a lot less,” he said. “This program is a workforce development and job-preparedness program that really gives people the skills, the confidence, as well as the opportunity to open the doors of jobs where they can take care of their family.”
Graduates who land union hotel jobs start at around $18 an hour and get low-cost health care, paid vacation and sick time, pensions and 401(k)s, and access to housing and legal services. Around a third of union members work their way up to positions paying more than $60,000 a year, according to Local 26.
You know, the jobs real Americans do not want.
Immigrants have replaced African-Americans in hotel jobs in recent years, pushing the percentage of African-American housekeepers, cooks, and bellmen into the low single-digits, union officials said. Among students who take classes at the union’s hospitality training center, only 16 percent speak English as a native language.
The phenomenon is attributed in part to a misperception that hospitality jobs are low-paying, dead-end jobs that Americans do not want.
Say again? More like what I have been saying: illegals complain and cost less.
In addition, some hotel managers seem to believe immigrants have a stronger work ethic, while others may view immigrants as “less likely to know and assert their rights in this country,” said Brian Lang, president of Unite Here Local 26.
Industry representatives said the imbalance is simply due to more immigrants applying for hotel jobs....
I'm tired of lame-a$$ excuses being trotted out by $elf-$erving $pokespeople, sorry.
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