With Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg coming to town next week, a group of housekeepers, nightclub servers, and other employees of a Boston hotel are trying to turn her now-famous campaign for empowering women in their favor as they move toward forming a union.
Unite Here Local 26, which is organizing workers at the Hilton DoubleTree Suites hotel near the Charles River, said it wanted to enlist Sandberg’s help after facing resistance from Hilton and receiving no encouragement from Harvard University, which owns the property where the hotel is located.
So, the union decided, why not appeal to the author of the bestseller “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”?
Organizers asked Sandberg to meet with the hotel’s female workers. They started an online petition calling for her to become involved in their cause. And they created leaflets depicting the book’s cover, with faces of housekeepers replacing Sandberg’s, and a message that reads, “Sheryl Sandberg, will you lean in with the women of Harvard’s hotel?”
The Facebook chief operating officer, who is scheduled to deliver a Class Day address at Harvard Wednesday, has sent word she does not have time to host a “Lean In circle” with the hotel employees. Undeterred, the workers are planning to hand out the leaflets during Sandberg’s speech in Harvard Yard.
“It’s a way of continuing to say to Harvard that at every turn these women are going to be in your face,” said Brian Lang, president of Local 26, which represents hospitality industry workers. “It’s very clear to us that Harvard is calling the shots.”
Lang said the school already has about 600 unionized food service workers on campus.
Going after the property owner, along with the business owner, is a tactic unions sometimes use to garner more attention for their campaigns, said James Green, a labor historian at the University of Massachusetts Boston. And invoking a high-visibility landlord like Harvard is a natural fit. “It’s got the reputation of being a liberal institution,” he said.
Bill Murphy, Harvard’s director of labor and employee relations, said through a spokesman that it “will support any fair process for unionization that is agreed upon between Hilton and Local 26.”
But in a letter sent to the union last May, Murphy wrote that Harvard “respectfully declines Local 26’s request for the university to insert itself into this organizing campaign.”
The attempt to unionize the workers began more than a year ago, when 70 percent of the approximately 112 nonmanagerial workers at the DoubleTree — housekeepers, banquet servers, front desk agents, van drivers, and Scullers Jazz Club employees — signed a petition asking for a “fair process,” Local 26 said.
Such an agreement would allow them to discuss joining a union without retaliation from the company. When a group of workers and Harvard students tried to deliver the petition to the former general manager, he refused to accept it, according to Local 26.
Emma Perdomo (right) is depicted on a fliter modeled after Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book (left).
In March, the union called for a boycott of the hotel and workers started asking regular guests to stay elsewhere.
A spokesman for Hilton Worldwide, which operates the DoubleTree Suites, said the appropriate way to determine if workers want to organize is through a secret ballot overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
Hilton also said most of the hotel’s workers do not want union representation.
“This belief was reinforced by the recent protest rally at the hotel that was attended by only a very small minority of our team members and by a nearly complete absence of employee support for subsequent unsuccessful rallies that the union has tried to organize,” the company said in a statement. “We have reason to believe that a large majority actively oppose any boycott.”
DoubleTree management has held meetings with employees, both in groups and one-on-one, to discourage them from unionizing, according to Local 26. It said management retaliated against one organizing committee member by putting fliers in the cafeteria and locker room calling him a “mole” and taking away extra shifts at Scullers.
Hilton declined to respond to the allegations.
Sandberg has been criticized for creating a movement aimed at financially well-off women, but her Lean In foundation says it has partnered with several organizations that serve lower-income women, including Dress for Success, and supports Lean In circles of domestic workers in San Francisco, as well as rescued sex slaves in Miami.
“The principles of Lean In are just as, if not more, important to women with lower incomes,” foundation spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an e-mail.
As part of the local hospitality workers union, DoubleTree workers would stand to get a bump in pay, more affordable health insurance, and standardized workloads.
DoubleTree workers are not necessarily on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Housekeeper Delmy Lemus, for instance, earns $15.82 an hour, plus tips, and has access to company-subsidized health insurance.
But Lemus, 33, said the family plan rates would consume nearly half her weekly paycheck. She decided to opt out of the benefit and enroll herself and her two daughters in MassHealth, the state insurance plan for low-income residents.
The job is physically demanding, Lemus said. When she was pregnant with her now 4-year-old daughter, Lemus began suffering sciatic nerve pain and was barely able to stand by the end of her shifts.
In her eighth month of pregnancy, she was assigned to the hotel’s laundry room. Lemus said she had to push carts loaded with linen and pull out heavy sofa beds.
“Almost every day I was crying,” the Revere resident said.
In a survey of dozens of DoubleTree workers done for Local 26 last summer, Harvard student Gabriel Bayard said every employee he interviewed complained of chronic pain, and nearly all said their workloads had increased in recent years.
More than 100 Harvard students have gotten involved in the DoubleTree campaign, including Sasanka Jinadasa, 21, president of the Radcliffe Union of Students, a feminist advocacy group. “If [Harvard] has a vested interest in the profits and the outcome of the company, it should care about what the workers want as well,” she said.
“Harvard has a duty to make sure that the standards of the DoubleTree are up to the standards of the workers on campus.”
Lemus, a single mother, wants to save up enough money to send her daughters to college and eventually start her own housecleaning service. She said “leaning in” to make her voice heard, and fighting for union protections, is the beginning of that process.
“We’re just housekeepers, people without education. But we work very hard,” she said. “We have dreams. . . . We don’t want to die cleaning rooms in a hotel.”
Katie Johnston can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @ktkjohnston.
Sheryl Sandberg! Lean In with Harvard’s DoubleTree workers!
The women who work at Harvar’ds DoubleTree are leaning in! They want to meet with Sheryl Sandberg when she is in town for Harvard’s class day on May 28th. Sheryl, lean in with the DoubleTree workers! Click on the title above to view the video.
Workers trying to unionize appeal to Sheryl Sandberg
With Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg coming to town next week, a group of housekeepers, nightclub servers, and other employees of a Boston hotel are trying to turn her now-famous campaign for empowering women in their favor as they move toward forming a union.
Unite Here Local 26, which is organizing workers at the Hilton DoubleTree Suites hotel near the Charles River, said it wanted to enlist Sandberg’s help after facing resistance from Hilton and receiving no encouragement from Harvard University, which owns the property where the hotel is located.
So, the union decided, why not appeal to the author of the bestseller “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”?
Organizers asked Sandberg to meet with the hotel’s female workers. They started an online petition calling for her to become involved in their cause. And they created leaflets depicting the book’s cover, with faces of housekeepers replacing Sandberg’s, and a message that reads, “Sheryl Sandberg, will you lean in with the women of Harvard’s hotel?”
The Facebook chief operating officer, who is scheduled to deliver a Class Day address at Harvard Wednesday, has sent word she does not have time to host a “Lean In circle” with the hotel employees. Undeterred, the workers are planning to hand out the leaflets during Sandberg’s speech in Harvard Yard.
“It’s a way of continuing to say to Harvard that at every turn these women are going to be in your face,” said Brian Lang, president of Local 26, which represents hospitality industry workers. “It’s very clear to us that Harvard is calling the shots.”
Lang said the school already has about 600 unionized food service workers on campus.
Going after the property owner, along with the business owner, is a tactic unions sometimes use to garner more attention for their campaigns, said James Green, a labor historian at the University of Massachusetts Boston. And invoking a high-visibility landlord like Harvard is a natural fit. “It’s got the reputation of being a liberal institution,” he said.
Bill Murphy, Harvard’s director of labor and employee relations, said through a spokesman that it “will support any fair process for unionization that is agreed upon between Hilton and Local 26.”
But in a letter sent to the union last May, Murphy wrote that Harvard “respectfully declines Local 26’s request for the university to insert itself into this organizing campaign.”
The attempt to unionize the workers began more than a year ago, when 70 percent of the approximately 112 nonmanagerial workers at the DoubleTree — housekeepers, banquet servers, front desk agents, van drivers, and Scullers Jazz Club employees — signed a petition asking for a “fair process,” Local 26 said.
Such an agreement would allow them to discuss joining a union without retaliation from the company. When a group of workers and Harvard students tried to deliver the petition to the former general manager, he refused to accept it, according to Local 26.
Emma Perdomo (right) is depicted on a fliter modeled after Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book (left).
In March, the union called for a boycott of the hotel and workers started asking regular guests to stay elsewhere.
A spokesman for Hilton Worldwide, which operates the DoubleTree Suites, said the appropriate way to determine if workers want to organize is through a secret ballot overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
Hilton also said most of the hotel’s workers do not want union representation.
“This belief was reinforced by the recent protest rally at the hotel that was attended by only a very small minority of our team members and by a nearly complete absence of employee support for subsequent unsuccessful rallies that the union has tried to organize,” the company said in a statement. “We have reason to believe that a large majority actively oppose any boycott.”
DoubleTree management has held meetings with employees, both in groups and one-on-one, to discourage them from unionizing, according to Local 26. It said management retaliated against one organizing committee member by putting fliers in the cafeteria and locker room calling him a “mole” and taking away extra shifts at Scullers.
Hilton declined to respond to the allegations.
Sandberg has been criticized for creating a movement aimed at financially well-off women, but her Lean In foundation says it has partnered with several organizations that serve lower-income women, including Dress for Success, and supports Lean In circles of domestic workers in San Francisco, as well as rescued sex slaves in Miami.
“The principles of Lean In are just as, if not more, important to women with lower incomes,” foundation spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an e-mail.
As part of the local hospitality workers union, DoubleTree workers would stand to get a bump in pay, more affordable health insurance, and standardized workloads.
DoubleTree workers are not necessarily on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Housekeeper Delmy Lemus, for instance, earns $15.82 an hour, plus tips, and has access to company-subsidized health insurance.
But Lemus, 33, said the family plan rates would consume nearly half her weekly paycheck. She decided to opt out of the benefit and enroll herself and her two daughters in MassHealth, the state insurance plan for low-income residents.
The job is physically demanding, Lemus said. When she was pregnant with her now 4-year-old daughter, Lemus began suffering sciatic nerve pain and was barely able to stand by the end of her shifts.
In her eighth month of pregnancy, she was assigned to the hotel’s laundry room. Lemus said she had to push carts loaded with linen and pull out heavy sofa beds.
“Almost every day I was crying,” the Revere resident said.
In a survey of dozens of DoubleTree workers done for Local 26 last summer, Harvard student Gabriel Bayard said every employee he interviewed complained of chronic pain, and nearly all said their workloads had increased in recent years.
More than 100 Harvard students have gotten involved in the DoubleTree campaign, including Sasanka Jinadasa, 21, president of the Radcliffe Union of Students, a feminist advocacy group. “If [Harvard] has a vested interest in the profits and the outcome of the company, it should care about what the workers want as well,” she said.
“Harvard has a duty to make sure that the standards of the DoubleTree are up to the standards of the workers on campus.”
Lemus, a single mother, wants to save up enough money to send her daughters to college and eventually start her own housecleaning service. She said “leaning in” to make her voice heard, and fighting for union protections, is the beginning of that process.
“We’re just housekeepers, people without education. But we work very hard,” she said. “We have dreams. . . . We don’t want to die cleaning rooms in a hotel.”
Katie Johnston can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @ktkjohnston.
Can Freddie Mac skirt Mass. consumer law?
Ramon Suero left the Dominican Republic for Boston over a decade ago because he believes in the American Dream. That belief remains intact, even though Suero has spent the past three-and-a-half years in court, fighting government lawyers who are trying to kick Suero’s family out of their Dorchester home. Suero bought his tiny slice of Upham’s Corner a decade ago, but whether he gets to keep it largely hinges on two questions: whether state laws aimed at bringing Wall Street’s worst actors to heel can also protect Massachusetts residents from their own government, and whether government-controlled mortgage businesses are in business to save money, or exact revenge on foreclosed families.
Suero is the kind of borrower that subprime mortgage lenders got paid to exploit during the housing boom. In 2005, the notorious subprime lender Option One gave Suero a no-money down mortgage with an exploding interest rate — the kind of mortgage that brought down the entire economy. The loan allowed Suero, who was working two full-time hotel jobs, to buy a condo in an Upham’s Corner triple-decker. Massachusetts later sued Option One, alleging that the firm illegally steered high-risk loans to non-native English speakers and poor communities of color; the company paid a $10 million settlement.
Suero refinanced into a vanilla loan that wound up in the hands of Freddie Mac, the nationalized mortgage investor. He fell behind on his loan due to a family illness, and, he and the local hotel workers union say, because he was fired for union organizing. Freddie foreclosed in late 2010. Suero has been fighting to get his home back ever since.
The fight has taken Suero from the Boston Housing Court to the federal courthouse on Fan Pier. An eviction battle has morphed into a tug of war over whether the federal government can exempt itself from Massachusetts’s consumer protection laws.
Boston Community Capital, a local nonprofit, runs a loan fund that works with foreclosed families. It buys foreclosed homes and sells them back to their former owners, stabilizing families and neighborhoods in the process. Boston Community Capital has cleared Suero to borrow the money he needs to buy his Upham’s Corner home back. The problem is, Freddie Mac refuses to sell to Suero and Boston Community Capital, or anyone like them.
Freddie Mac and its larger corporate sibling, Fannie Mae, won’t sell foreclosed homes back to their former owners unless they receive the full value of the foreclosed mortgage — sums that are normally well above what the properties are worth now. Fannie and Freddie will charge market prices to any other buyer of a foreclosed home. But to those properties’ former owners, they charge a foreclosure premium. This premium all but assures that foreclosed homeowners won’t stay in their homes.
Foreclosure is a costly proposition for any bank, but Fannie and Freddie are picking and choosing whom they’re willing to lose money to. This policy is not something any large commercial bank subscribes to.
Fannie and Freddie also refuse to sell to nonprofits like Boston Community Capital that work with foreclosed homeowners. So when Boston Community Capital put in repeated offers to buy Suero’s home out of foreclosure, they went unanswered.
A 2012 Massachusetts law makes it illegal for any lender to put stipulations on a sale to a nonprofit. The law was aimed at lenders who refuse to do business with firms that work with foreclosed homeowners, and Fannie and Freddie are by far the biggest offenders. Suero sued Freddie last fall for violating this law.
Freddie’s lawyers have already made noises about claiming that, since they’ve been federalized, they’re immune from the state law. Last summer, lawyers representing Fannie and Freddie successfully maneuvered out of a Chicago ordinance requiring them to register, and pay fees on, vacant foreclosed properties. So there’s clearly a chance that the Massachusetts law might fall to the same arguments about federal powers that knocked down Chicago’s foreclosure efforts. The bigger question is what Freddie Mac actually gains by sinking untold sums of money into a years-long legal battle to wrest an Upham’s Corner condo from a family that wants nothing more than to see Freddie get paid and walk away.
Officials ‘ashamed,’ boycotting Harvard graduation over hotel labor vote dispute
Anti-union actions at a Harvard-owned hotel in Allston drew strong reactions from residents and city officials Monday. In addition to supporting a boycott of the Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Hotel, councillor E. Denise Simmons proposed urging the Boston City Council and others to take similar actions; Nadeem Mazen wanted to teleconference with Harvard officials to pressure them face to face to act to allow unionization; and Dennis Benzan had an even more personal approach.
“I was invited to attend Harvard University’s commencement. As a result of what I’m seeing happen at the DoubleTree Hotel and the inaction of Harvard, I am hereby withdrawing any consideration I have to attending the commencement until they take this matter seriously and respect the dignity of the workers,” Benzan said.
Harvard owns the building at 400 Soldiers Field Road, Allston, that hosts the Hilton-run hotel and Scullers Jazz Club. Workers told management in March 2013 that they wanted a fair process to decide on unionization, but as of Monday the vote had been stymied by managerial resistance, representatives said.
Hilton Worldwide prefers another vote method, the company told The Harvard Crimson, and Harvard says it will support “any fair process of unionization agreed upon by Hilton and its employees.”
Hotel workers sat as a group Monday wearing the bright red T-shirts of the Unite Here labor group and standing together at times as representative members spoke during public comment about their hard work and loyalty for the company, which they felt responded with low wages and poor working conditions.
Strong reaction
Resident and labor activist Vicky Steinitz, of Cambridge United for Justice With Peace, compared Harvard’s treatment of its own direct employees with those at the hotel it has owned since 2005 and said, “This is hypocrisy, in my view, of the worst kind.” John Bach, Harvard’s Quaker chaplain, saw similar disconnect when invoking memories of the school’s actions 50 years ago during the Vietnam war, when its graduates led the nation into war while its students were arrested for protesting it. “What kind of Harvard do we want to encourage to be our neighbor?” he asked.
Mazen said he saw Harvard as a good neighbor who probably hadn’t acted on worker issues at the DoubleTree because its officials had too many other things on its plate. A teleconference could help add pressure, he said.
But the rhetoric of other councillors – four of whom protested at the DoubleTree last month alongside students, workers and their supporters – were at times as strong as their constituents, with Marc McGovern saying managers “are not treating working men and women fairly, and we’re not going to stand for that.”
There are plenty of other hotels in the area that have unionized workers and are doing fine, councillor Leland Cheung said, and as a Harvard graduate he was far less understanding of the university’s failure to act on labor issues at the DoubleTree:
Cambridge City Council Votes To Support DoubleTree Workers
The Cambridge City Council voted unanimously Monday to support the boycott of the Boston-Cambridge DoubleTree Hotel, a sign of support for hotel employees trying to unionize.
The boycott, which was launched last month, is a part of ongoing efforts by DoubleTree employees, Harvard’s Student Labor Action Movement, and area union UNITE HERE! Local 26 to get the hotel to allow workers to unionize by fair process. Workers and activists are also working to push Harvard to put pressure on the DoubleTree, which is located in a Harvard-owned building, in hopes that managers will become more receptive to allowing fair process unionization.
Several DoubleTree employees clad in UNITE HERE! Local 26 union t-shirts testified at the City Council meeting Monday evening asking the City Council members to endorse the boycott. Workers cited a lack of adequate insurance and a lack of respect, among other grievances, about their treatment under DoubleTree management.
“They don’t respect me. They don’t appreciate what I’ve done for this hotel,” Celia Li, a DoubleTree housekeeper who said she has worked at the DoubleTree for over 30 years, said in front of the Council.
The hotel said at the start of the boycott that it does not believe that a true majority of DoubleTree workers wish to be represented by any union. Hilton, which owns DoubleTree, could not be reached for comment on the most recent developments. Hotel workers and advocates said that management has not addressed the boycott, and it does not appear that the hotel has suffered losses from the boycott.
University officials maintain that Harvard will support any fair process of unionization agreed upon by Hilton and its employees.
“It’s still a lot of the same,” Student Labor Action Movement member Gabriel H. Bayard ’15 said. “I think there’s a lot of community momentum but our main job right now is to get people not to stay at the hotel.”
Although DoubleTree managers have not addressed the boycott, workers said they have noticed difference in the work environment at the hotel.
“We see the change already. We have benefits already,” DoubleTree houseman Victor Bernabe said. “We have more respect. Now it’s [totally] different.”
Demand For Better Healthcare TIANA A ABDULMASSIH
Sandra Herandez, an employee of the Doubletree Hotel in Allston, waits to give a statement at the Cambridge City Council meeting on April 28. A housekeeper at the hotel for twenty two years, Hernandez exclaimed “I’m here for a fair process”.
DoubleTree employees and advocates claim the hotel is making working conditions better in order to give workers fewer reasons to push for fair process of unionization. Still, Bernabe said he had doubts.
“I want [the union] 100 percent more now,” Bernabe said. “You know why? I don’t want to go back to before. I want it better and better and better. I know if we win the fair process it will 100 percent be better.”
Although unsure about tangible successes thus far, students and advocates continue to promote the boycott. Last week, several advocates distributed flyers at a conference at the DoubleTree to publicize the boycott.
“I didn’t ask anyone to change their reservation. We just want people to know about [the boycott] so they don’t come back next time,” said Harvard Kennedy School student and activist Michael “Mick” R. Power. “You could say [the guests] felt a bit dirty being there when they heard it.”
Employees and activists said that they view the city council support as a success.
“That’s very good for us. [It’s] not only inside, we need [support] from outside too,” Bername said.
—Staff writer Mariel A. Klein can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @mariel_klein.
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