Dan Harr
July 2,
2006
It looks like
a very bad labor quagmire down at the Marriott Hotel and Connecticut Convention
Center, the riverfront fulcrum of Hartford's hopes for revival.
For now, it
appears to be a mess that benefits no one. Clearly, the multifront war is
bringing unwelcome attention to the city and is hurting the convention center
at a crucial time.
As bad as it
looks, this colossal gum-up just might help the group that, so far, is
something of an afterthought: the nearly 350 hotel and convention workers.
A least four
unions are preparing to organize, or actually working to sign up, employees at
the complex. Two of the unions, working in tandem, are inciting a boycott of
the hotel and convention center, driving away several sizable convention groups
already.
This, just as
the year-old, $275 million, state-owned hall is trying to gain traction at a
fiercely competitive time for convention centers of its type.
The boycotting
unions say the company that owns the hotel and manages the convention center -
Waterford Group Inc. - refuses to bargain fairly and is waging what Anthony
Dugdale, a Unite Here! organizer, calls an "aggressive anti-union
campaign."
Len Wolman,
the Waterford president, says his company has not only followed federal labor
laws, but also has - so far, at least - forsaken its right to try to persuade
workers to remain union-free.
The city of
Hartford, for its part, has sued Waterford, saying the hotel has an obligation
to reach a "labor peace" agreement under city ordinances because it
enjoys a $30 million tax break. No one knows exactly what labor peace means,
but at the least it requires the company to satisfy the unions enough to end
the boycott and picketing.
Waterford has
taken the unusual step of petitioning for an immediate, secret-ballot union
vote under federal rules.
Michael
Cicchetti, the No. 2 official at the state agency that owns the convention
center, said a Unite Here! official openly admitted the union will never agree
to a secret-ballot election, instead insisting on a "card-check"
agreement that grants collective bargaining based on a percentage of workers
who petition for it. Dugdale, in response, said Cicchetti is twisting his
words.
Further
mucking up the works, we have the specter of competition between unions for the
same workers. Union leaders don't like this one bit. They are loath to admit it
even exists - though, in this case, it's growing more impossible for them to
deny with each passing day.
Competition
between unions has been rare, to say the least, over the past 50 years. What's
doubly odd here is that the unions competing - Unite Here! and the Service
Employees International Union on one side, the Laborers International Union on
the other - are all members of the coalition that broke away from the AFL-CIO
last summer.
Lastly, we
have racial politics playing out under the surface. The Laborers, led by
Charles LeConche, ticked off Hartford's Latino community in May by picketing a
Latino coalition's fundraising dinner and scaring away its star speaker, New
York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. This, over a flap with a sponsor of the
event, ING Group, even though ING pulled out.
Now, the
Laborers union has stepped into this fray, signing a labor peace deal offered
by Waterford, which gives the union access to convention workers at a time when
Hartford's popular Latino leader, Mayor Eddie Perez, is suing Waterford over
labor peace.
Dugdale, at
Unite Here!, calls the Waterford offer "ridiculous." The deal
requires any union signing it to end boycotts and pickets, and also imposes a
strict 60-day organizing time limit. Further, there is no language in the deal
that requires Waterford to remain neutral.
But it isn't
just the Laborers who agreed to the deal. At least one other union has signed
it, a source involved in talks said Friday. Neither Wolman nor officials at the
state agency that owns the convention center would discuss who had signed the
deal.
It would be
tempting to say that Waterford and the Capital City Economic Development
Authority, which owns the center, should offer a truly neutral deal that
explicitly bars them from trying to sway workers from unionizing- a deal that
would end the boycott.
And it would
be tempting to say that Unite Here! and the service employees union are hurting
the city exactly at a time when Hartford is starting to turn around its rotten
national image. After all, pay and benefits are not the prime issue here.
Wolman says the workers' overall compensation package at the Marriott is the
same as the package at the unionized downtown Hartford Hilton, which Waterford
owns and operates - though he wouldn't give details. Clearly, workers have been
hurt by canceled events.
And it would
be tempting, moreover, to chide the region's unions for competing to sign up
well-paid hotel and convention center employees at a time when tens of
thousands of service and retail workers in Connecticut toil at barely more than
minimum wage, unprotected by unions.
Tempting, but
wrong. We've had decades of cooperation between unions and management, and
cooperation among unions. There's a strong argument to be made that all this
"labor peace" hurts workers in the long run.
So maybe peace
isn't the answer. Let the unions disrupt commerce that's important to the
region. That is the best leverage unions have, after all. Let the unions fight
with management, rather than colluding with exclusive peace agreements that
guarantee them members and deliver to management a compliant union leadership.
Let the unions
fight among themselves for employees of a complex that's relatively accessible
because it receives public money.
"Let's
let it rip and trust that rank-and-file workers know what's best for
them," said Jonathan Cutler, associate professor of sociology at Wesleyan
University and a leading proponent of competition among unions.
Ah, the
rank-and-file workers. If they can survive this imbroglio, they might come out
the winners.