Saturday, April 24, 2010

Who Stays At the Hyatt?

Well, maybe if you need a place to sleep it off.

Related
: Whatever Happened at the Hyatt?

Turns out nothing at all.

All the time and space spent pushing that particular agenda, and for what?

"Ex-Hyatt workers find job market hard to penetrate; 7 months after layoffs, dozens of housekeepers still unemployed" by Katie Johnston Chase, Globe Staff | April 2, 2010

Lucine Williams has applied for countless jobs since she lost her housekeeping position last summer at the Hyatt Regency Boston, where she had worked for nearly 22 years.

Didn't really "lose" it, did she?

Shaw’s, CVS, Walgreens, Eddie Bauer, the MBTA, and several hotels have all been on her list.

I'm surprised Shaw's didn't take her to bust their union.

“I even applied at McDonald’s,’’ said Williams, 42, one of the 98 Boston-area Hyatt housekeepers abruptly fired on Aug. 31 and replaced by the subcontracted cleaning company workers they had been training for months. But, she said, “Nobody calls.’’

Even as we have had a full six months of roaring growth in the economy?

Seven months after the firings and the considerable public attention that followed, more than 60 of the longtime housekeepers from the Hyatt Regency Boston, the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and the Hyatt Harborside at Logan Airport are still unemployed, according to the local hospitality workers’ union, Unite Here Local 26. Their extended health benefits officially ended Wednesday. The plight of the Boston-area Hyatt housekeepers, many of them immigrant women, illustrates the broader struggles of workers with lower income and education levels.

Look, I want all people to be happy; however, considering the hell Americans have gone through the last for years this is the last agenda they want being shoved in their face.

Not only that, all the bigwigs and politicos failed. They didn't get these people their jobs back or anything. Globe is just checking in on them (probably because a land sale reminded them; can always pick up a cudgel you planted in the readers' minds).

The rate of underemployment and unemployment among housekeepers and janitors is 25 percent — the third-highest among 60 occupations studied and far higher than the overall rate of 15.4 percent, according to Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “At the low end of the ladder, it’s not only that the unemployment rate is high, but that the number of applicants for every job is extraordinarily high,’’ Sum said.

Meanwhile, out of the other side of the Globe's mouth it has been labor market healing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, for months and months.

Scrubbing toilets and changing sheets is not glamorous work, but the Hyatt housekeepers say they took pride in being able to support their families, both here and in their native countries, and in having health care and retirement plans.

Not that I don't want everyone to have it, but when they are illegals or sending money out of the country that is not helping things.

Nor is the VERY CORPORATE POLICIES the GLOBE SUPPORTS that is DRIVING THEM HERE.

Of course, that is the whole point of this agenda-pushing garbage.

Many still get choked up when they talk about losing their jobs, which paid about $15 an hour — almost double what their minimum-wage replacements are making.

Well, we all get choked up, and I never even made that much an hour.

The Hyatt housekeepers refused to go quietly. More than half of them have been actively speaking out against the company, appearing at events around the country and contacting Hyatt clients to ask them to boycott the three local Hyatt hotels, an effort organized by Unite Here Local 26. The housekeepers were not members of the union, but it took on their cause....

So labor takes up for the very group that is undercutting them?

That is one reason -- among many -- why I no longer respect Amerikan labor.

The company responded to the initial outcry by extending the workers’ health benefits at no cost through the end of March and offering all of the housekeepers jobs with the outsourcing company, United Service Cos., at their Hyatt wages through the end of this year. Only six of the housekeepers took the hotel company up on its offer. Of the remaining 92, about 25 have found work — as housekeepers, office cleaners, an airport concessions worker, a taxi driver, a grocery clerk. The rest are still looking.

Lucine Williams’s unemployment checks are helping her pay $500 a month to rent the upstairs apartment in her mother’s house in Dorchester, where she lives with her 14-year-old son. But anything extra goes on her credit card, and she says she is “in debt past my eyeballs.’’ Before her Hyatt health insurance ran out, she signed up for MassHealth, the Medicaid program for low-income residents, and tried to get her son one more prescription for his asthma medicine....

For the past 14 years, Anna Rendon, 52, has had a second job cleaning offices to help put two of her three sons through college. Her husband has been receiving worker’s compensation since a construction site accident three years ago. Their middle son got a scholarship to Boston College and is now studying to be an orthodontist in Rendon’s native Colombia.

Rendon still works nights cleaning offices and is enrolled in a seven-month, 30-hour-a-week English For Employment program at the YMCA International Learning Center on Huntington Avenue. She is hoping to land a bookkeeping job, like she had back home, but so far, speaking in Spanish through a translator, she has even been turned down for a job putting electronic equipment together....

Wanda Rosario will probably be called to work only a few days a week until the busy summer season starts. But with an 84-year-old father at home, a phone that is about to be disconnected, a sister in El Salvador to support, and a husband in the Dominican Republic trying to come to the United States, Rosario counts herself among the lucky ones....

You know, we have our own problems here.

I'm not trying to be mean or insensitive or anything like that.

I'm just tired of the divisive, racist, Zionist paper flogging the f*** out of the American people with the issue.

--more--"

Also see:
Illegals Already Have Amnesty

Sort of exposes the whole issue for the tail-chasing fraud it is, huh?


'course, that boycott was a success!


"Hyatt sells Hub property to trust; Hotel will maintain its Regency flag" by Katie Johnston Chase, Globe Staff | March 20, 2010

Hyatt Hotels Corp. has sold the Hyatt Regency Boston, one of the three local Hyatt hotels that fired their entire housekeeping staffs last year and replaced them with lower-paid subcontracted workers. The Chesapeake Lodging Trust, a lodging real estate investment trust of which Hyatt has a 4.9 percent ownership stake, purchased the 498-room property for $112 million, but Hyatt will continue to manage the hotel under the Hyatt Regency flag.

The Boston property has been the focus of a boycott organized by Unite Here Local 26, the hospitality workers union that is supporting the 98 fired housekeepers, who were not part of the union. The union estimates that the boycott has pulled $1 million worth of business from the downtown hotel, as well as $1 million from the other two area Hyatts, in Cambridge and at Logan International Airport.

I'm sure that helped the economy, because it has not -- and will not -- be helping the workers.

In fact, I'll bet Hyatt profited off the whole thing despite the reduced business because their labor and health costs were way, way down.

Hyatt spokeswoman Amy Patti, who declined to comment on the company’s financial performance, said that Hyatt’s Boston hotels haven’t bounced back from the recession like some of its other properties have, but that the sale has nothing to do with the boycott....

Even if it does, who cares? Globe made it an issue because that is what they do.

So WHEN does the CALL for BOYCOTT come in regards to ISRAEL, huh?

Unite Here Local 26 president Janice Loux called the sale a “fancy maneuver.’’ “They’re doing some sort of a fancy restructuring, I think, to somehow remove themselves from some of the liability,’’ she said.

See: The Boston Globe's Looky Loux

Pure, 100% agenda-pushing passing as "news."

If the Boston Hyatt has indeed lost $1 million due to the boycott on top of weak revenues during the recession, said hotel consultant Stanley Turkel, “it can’t be a very happy situation.’’

Yeah, no one really knows. That is what the pro-boycott people say; who knows how much was due to the s*** economy.

The latest group to pull out of the Boston Hyatt is Suffolk University, which for the past two school years has rented out 60 rooms for 110 students to use as dorm rooms. The university did not disclose the price it pays for the rooms. “Suffolk University has been approached by former Hyatt workers as well as by students who are sympathetic to their plight,’’ John Nucci, Suffolk’s vice president for external affairs, said in a statement yesterday. The boycott, coupled with a new 200-bed residence hall opening in the fall, drove Suffolk’s decision not to use Hyatt hotel rooms for its students next year, Nucci said.

And how much are they paying the president?

--more--"

And this next move doesn't surprise me at all
:

"Cambridge seeks change to hotel laws" by Brock Parker, Globe Correspondent | April 7, 2010

Cambridge city councilors are calling for a change to local licensing laws that would prohibit hotels from subcontracting housekeeping services after Hyatt Regency Cambridge fired its housekeepers last August and replaced them with lower-paid subcontracted workers....

--more--"

Related
: Boston Globe Bubble Will Not Burst

I won't be staying in the city anytime soon anyway, so....