This coming week, students are joining with hotel workers across the country to declare a national week of action against HEI Hotels and Resorts.
We are coming together to protest the unjust working conditions at hotels managed by HEI, the country's seventh-largest hotel management company. Like several other universities, Brown is invested in HEI, meaning that it is implicated in the company's ongoing workers' rights abuses and has an obligation to act to end them.
This is not a new revelation. Workers and students began organizing against HEI two years ago. After consistent pressure from students and a recommendation by the University's Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP), in February 2010 President Ruth Simmons publicly wrote a letter to the company's CEO, saying, "if there were to be any truth to the claims of the union and others that workers at some of your properties have been subjected to intimidation by managers due to their pro-union activities, this would be a matter of deep concern and contrary to our standards for investing" ("Simmons warns HEI over rights," Mar. 19).
On paper, at least, the University is committed to the principle that it should not invest in practices that violate workers' rights to organize. In practice, in the eight months since Simmons wrote her letter, evidence to verify the allegations over which she expressed concern has mounted, with no corresponding University action to validate the integrity of her statement.
In August, workers at the HEI-owned Embassy Suites Irvine called a one-day strike in response to management's systematic denial of their legal right to take breaks during their workday. The hotel's working conditions and explicit orders from managers had prevented workers from taking their daily breaks, leading half of the hotel's workforce to file a complaint seeking $120,000 in backpay owed as compensation.
Since the Embassy Suites workers' campaign began, the company has threatened and disciplined union activists. One housekeeper, Albertina Solorio, was threatened with losing her job for allegedly taking too long to clean a room. Another, Teresa Lozano, was suspended after raising a question about her paycheck with her manager. Both of these disciplinary actions were taken after they participated in picket lines to demand that workers be allowed to take their breaks.
HEI will deny any correlation between the company's disciplinary actions and these workers' union activism. Brown and ACCRIP, however, should know better than to believe that. Last year, the committee heard evidence regarding the firing of union leader Ferdi Lazo at another HEI property, the Sheraton Crystal City. At the time, the company adamantly claimed that Lazo's firing was entirely justified and unrelated to his union activity. This June, a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board's General Counsel re-instated him with full seniority and back wages.
The Student Labor Alliance, in bringing this information to representatives of ACCRIP and the investment office, was assured that the settlement rendered concerns about unfair labor practices at the Sheraton Crystal City a thing of the past — that only new reports of such abuses going forward merited University attention. Alas, prior to this settlement, ACCRIP had instead maintained that, because the Labor Relations Board had not yet responded to these claims, it could not take action based only on allegations.
Therein lies the brilliance of the University's logic. It is unable to respond to claims of mistreatment voiced directly by workers, like Ferdi Lazo, Albertina Solorio and Teresa Lozano, because their assertions are "unconfirmed." However, it is also unwilling to consider these complaints once they are settled with the NLRB — even if such settlements result in the reinstatement of workers who were disciplined for their pro-union leadership, at which point they should not be retroactively dwelled upon. When the company again disciplines a new group of workers starting to organize, the primary evidence that initially exists regarding their claims is direct testimony, which ACCRIP rejects as "unverified" — and the cycle of inaction and disrespect to workers begins anew.
If the University's publicly-stated investment standards are to be taken to have any integrity, then it must stop funding HEI now. As Simmons wrote, anti-union intimidation of workers is "contrary to our standards for investing," and the records of workers' rights violations at the Sheraton Crystal City and Embassy Suites Irvine leave no ambiguity about whether or not HEI is in violation of those standards.
Maribel Duarte, a housekeeper at the Embassy Suites Irvine, says that before workers at the hotel began organizing, "we were ignored and we were afraid to lose our jobs. That's why I want to have a union — so I feel like we can speak up."
Workers at HEI hotels across the country have been "speaking up" for the past two years. It's time that the Brown investment office starts to listen.
Haley Kossek '13 is a member of the Student Labor Alliance. She may be contacted at haley_kossek@brown.edu
