Workers, Not Guests

Ten days before Christmas, the Woodfin Suites Hotel in Emeryville, California, suspended Luz Dominguez and twenty other housekeepers and maintenance workers. Managers announced they'd received a letter from Social Security saying the numbers they'd given when the workers were originally hired didn't match government records. The twenty-one workers have been making beds, washing toilets and vacuuming carpets there for years. Dominguez recalls, "Before, they sometimes told us they'd received a notice about our numbers not matching. We never had to do anything about it." What had changed?

In 2005 an Oakland-based worker advocacy group, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, convinced Emeryville voters to pass Measure C. The new ordinance established a $9 hourly minimum in the city's four hotels. Housekeepers required to clean more than 5,000 square feet in an eight-hour shift now have to be paid time and a half. "Before the law was passed, we cleaned sixteen suites, sometimes seventeen," says Marcela Melquiades, another fired housekeeper. The new law dropped that to around ten.

The four hotels--the Woodfin Suites, Sheraton Four Points, Marriott Courtyard and the Hilton Garden Inn--spent $115,610 to defeat the measure (but garnered only 1,051 no votes). When they lost, they tried to get an injunction to prevent it from taking effect and lost again. Workers began asking Woodfin to comply.

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