Striking Workers Battle Hotel Owned By Union Pension Fund

The union for hotel workers says the carpenters' pension fund should be pressuring the Hyatt Regency LAX to reach a deal.

Union workers who have battled dozens of Southern California hotels for new contracts are squaring off with an unlikely holdout: an airport hotel owned by the pension fund of a fellow union.

Unite Here Local 11, which represents housekeepers and other hotel workers, has been waging intermittent strikes across Los Angeles to pressure hotel operators into new collective bargaining agreements. The union says it has reached deals with 34 of roughly 70 properties after seven months of walkouts.

One of the hotels where workers are still picketing is the Hyatt Regency LAX, which is owned by the Southwest Carpenters Pension Trust, a pension fund for an affiliate of the carpenters union. The ongoing contract dispute means a hotel with union ties has found itself on a union’s boycott list.

Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, said he’d hoped the pension fund would compel the hotel’s management to “avoid labor strife” and agree to a deal. Instead, he said, the hotel has “chosen to fight.”

“When we went into this we expected them to be first, not near the end,” Petersen said of resolving a contract. “I don’t know why they would think it’s in their pensioners’ best interest to continue to put this hotel at risk, financially or image-wise.”