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At Simmons College, the dining hall may soon start serving a dish unfamiliar to the Fenway-area school: organized labor. Working in secret over the last year, a coalition of students, professors, and union members from UNITE HERE Local 26 have collaborated with cafeteria workers to help organize the employees into an official union.
On Tuesday, February 19, a group of workers and student-union allies formally asked their employer, Fortune 500 foodservice giant Aramark, to let workers exercise their right to organize. The request came in the form of a petition to Andy Allen, the director of dining at Simmons, and asked that Aramark not try to interrupt unionization efforts with “threats and intimidation.” Allen’s office did not return a request for comment on this story.
Fifteen of the city’s 24 unionized hotels have already signed the new five-year contract, which raises wages and benefits by 4 percent a year and strengthens protections for workers if a hotel is sold or goes into bankruptcy.
A delegation of workers at the Harvard-owned DoubleTree Suites by Hilton Hotel Boston presented hotel management with a petition Monday delcaring worker intentions to start the process of considering unionization.
The petition, which was signed by a majority of the hotel’s workers, outlines their desire to be able to decide without the influence of hotel management whether or not to join UNITE HERE! Local 26—the same union that represents Harvard’s dining hall workers.
Here’s a typical union tactic: Complain about the members’ pay levels or working conditions, with a goal of engendering the public’s sympathy.
But Brian Lang, president of Unite Here Local 26, is taking a different approach with his union’s latest contract negotiations. Lang knows his members make a decent living wage. He just wants to keep it that way.
Local 26 represents more than 4,000 hotel workers among 27 hotels in the Boston area. Contracts for 24 of those hotels — those within Boston’s city limits — expired at the end of February. So far, Lang says the union has new five-year contracts lined up for workers at 14 of the 24 hotels. He says the contracts’ parameters —such as a 4-percent annual increase in pay — stay the same among all the participating hotels, even though only some are negotiating together as a group.