Finding True North #23: Boycotting a "Not Kosher" Hotel

This has almost nothing to do with my field ed placement. However, it shows the kinds of friends I'm making in Indy: awesome ones. Today, my friend Rebecca, a Moravian pastor here in Indianapolis (but originally from NC, what's up!), roped me into participating in an action against the Hyatt Hotel downtown. The hospitality workers and community members have been working for fair process and union rights at the Hyatt for several years now. I had no idea what I was getting into, but the more I learn, the more interesting this looks.

The group I tagged along with today is called UniteHere! and today, housekeepers across the nation spoke out against poor working conditions at Hyatts all over. Here's something from UniteHere's website:

When two housekeepers in New York came forward to report assault on the job, taking on some of the most powerful men in the world, they exposed some of the grittier and oftentimes hidden aspects of hotel work--the work of scrubbing toilets, changing sheets, and encountering guests alone behind closed doors. Hotel housekeepers--overwhelmingly women, immigrants, and people of color--are the invisible backbone of the hotel industry. While incidents of sexual assault are uncommon, the women who work as housekeepers routinely face a broader spectrum of dangers at work, from sexual harassment to the debilitating injuries that many women sustain after years of making beds and scrubbing floors.

Perhaps most fascinating to me is that a group of clergy has come together and published an investigation into working conditions at Hyatts. Their findings have caused rabbis to pledge to declare the Hyatt "not kosher." Wow. (Read more here.)

I'm theoretically pro-union (because Amy Laura Hall is pro-union and I take my marching orders from her), but I've never paid really close attention to worker's rights beyond a vague interest in the recent brouhaha in Wisconsin and some talk about a living wage. Needless to say, I had never participated in a public action like this. It was kinda fun.

I was a part of the distraction. A group of us walked into the atrium of the Hyatt holding posters covered with pictures of various leaders at non-union Hyatts around the country, singing "We Shall Overcome." Meanwhile, a delegation, including both workers and community members, went to the general manager's office with the intention of giving him one of the posters and asking for an audience to discuss workers' rights and fair process.

Downstairs, we got through probably 15 stanzas of "We Shall Overcome" before we were asked to leave. It was, I admit, a little awkward, standing there in the lobby bellowing out a spiritual as people leaned over railings all the way up the multi-story building to see what we were doing. But public embarrassment is a big part of activism, I suppose.

We learned later that the delegation had been treated rudely in the office. The general manager was (apparently as usual) out for the afternoon. The delegation spoke with some other people in authority, and one Latina worker told about confronting an employee from Colombia who did not have time to talk, but the worker said, with tears streaming down her face, that she didn't understand how a person from the Latino/a community could be a part of a company that treated her own people so poorly.

So that was my adventure for the day. Rebecca said she'd keep me in the loop for the rest of my time here in Indy, and I intend to do further research to get up to speed on what's going on with the Hyatt, plus to figure out where this kind of thing is happening in Durham. I told some friends last night in an email that my inner activist is waking up, and it's freaking me (and, I suspect, the people around me) out a bit. In a good way.