This September, as the Co-Chair of the annual Hotel & Lodging Legal Summit at Georgetown Law, I was privileged to welcome Gwen Mills, the International Union President of UNITE HERE, as the keynote speaker of our 11th annual conference. Ms. Mills was interviewed by Professor David Sherwyn, the Academic Director of the Center for Innovative Hospitality and Employment Relations at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. We received some criticism for hosting the leader of North America’s largest hotel workers’ union so soon after strikes at hotels nationwide over Labor Day Weekend. (We had scheduled the interview months earlier.) However, conference attendees (most of whom are associated with hotel companies) gave the event positive reviews. This was because Gwen and David did an excellent job confronting challenging issues in a manner that was informative, conciliatory and constructive.
It therefore came as a disappointment when, at the Lodging Conference in Phoenix two weeks later, a friend called my attention to a website (which I will not link here) that purports to be “[m]aintained by UNITE HERE.” The website, which is still live as of this writing, targets an owner of several large hotels by quoting negative TripAdvisor reviews of several of its properties. I have no doubt that some of these hotels employ members of UNITE HERE. I assume that the website is a tactic that UNITE HERE believes will give the union some advantage in continued collective bargaining negotiations. This seems to me to be a scorched-earth approach. If a hotel suffers from negative reviews, it is in a worse position to grant concessions to its employees. UNITE HERE surely knows that. However, it has calculated that it is worth the potential short-term harm to its members to inflict whatever pain it can on this owner, in hopes that the owner will eventually relent and persuade its management companies to make concessions in the union’s favor. The strategy also seems extortionate. UNITE HERE might counter that the same two things could be said of a strike. Perhaps the difference is that strikes are more directly related to union members’ work. In any event, I am disappointed by what seems to be an underhanded tactic.