Doubletree employees urge school board to intervene in union effort Local hotel workers want school officials to help them unionize.
Local hotel workers want school officials to help them unionize.
Nearly 100 Doubletree Guest Suites and Hotel employees showed up at Wednesday’s school board meeting, hoping the district can help them in their plight of working in what they describe as poor conditions.
The school district is the hotel’s landlord — it leases the land to the Doubletree, located on Fourth Street just West of Santa Monica High School.
Wednesday’s protest appeared to be an attempt by union representatives to convince school district officials to help the workers unionize.
Hotel employees told Santa Monica-Malibu Unified school board members they are paid below $10 an hour and don’t get adequate health insurance. They spoke of their frustration over a campaign waged by the hotel’s management to prevent the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees local union 814 from organizing the resort’s labor.
Organizers also urged the school district to audit the Doubletree because rent paid by the hotel hasn’t increased in nearly four years.
Superintendent John Deasy instructed school district attorneys six weeks ago to review the lease with the Doubletree and begin an audit to ensure the hotel has been paying the proper rent.
According to a report presented by the union, the 253-room Doubletree paid $367,029 annual rent in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. They compared that to $468,440 in rent the city of Santa Monica received from the 148-room Pacific Shore Hotel, which is leased under a similar arrangement.
Under the original lease, approved in 1984, the hotel pays a flat rent that fluctuates based on room occupancy rates and the Consumer Price Index — an annual report issued by the federal government that’s widely used to track inflation.
However, a clause that allows for additional rent to be charged beginning in 1997 has not been executed by the school district, and the union wants the Doubletree’s books to be examined closely to determine if more money should be paid, union representatives said.
51C,“We don’t need to subsidize the lease of a multi-million dollar national hotel corporation,” said Albert Lowe, the union’s spokesman. “We need to look at this as a community and ask ourselves ‘are we getting our fair share and are we sponsoring a company that uses unethical labor practices?’”
“We don’t need to subsidize the lease of a multi-million dollar national hotel corporation. We need to look at this as a community and ask ourselves ‘are we getting our fair share and are we sponsoring a company that uses unethical labor practices?’” — — ALBERT LOWE Union spokesman
The Santa Monica-Malibu Council of PTAs said through a spokesman Wednesday night that the organization has endorsed the school district’s decision to audit the hotel and urged the administration to make the lease as “profitable to the extent possible.”
Messages left with Doubletree General Manager Darren Vaughn were not returned Thursday.
School board president Julia Brownley said board members were not allowed to discuss the workers’ request for school board intervention since the topic was not specifically advertised on the school board’s agenda.
“But know Doubletree workers that we have heard you,” she said.
The school board was told several weeks in advance about the protest and school board members were asked what the best night would be for the school district to hold the demonstration, union representatives said.
Hotel management would like to wage their own campaign against unionization, but union members want a vote by ballot, which prevents a campaign and the results cannot be challenged.
Hotel employees accused hotel management of threatening workers sympathetic to the union by selectively firing and cutting their hours after the economic slowdown related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
One Doubletree hotel employee said the hotel supplied her and her children with health insurance for $128 a month but this year the policy was canceled. She was given the option of a more expensive policy that was out of her budget.
“I struggled very hard to pay my bills all year long last year,” said Flora Andrade through an interpreter. “I am very worried because my children do not have health insurance and doctors last year found a heart murmur in my son and I don’t know if I can afford to get him treated without it.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 22, 2002. Read the original PDF.