By Scott Tucker
The price of a good night’s sleep
should not be low wages and high injury rates among hotel workers. We
must keep in mind that a degree of class mobility is compatible with the
usual class cruelty. For anyone who does not belong to the very
capstone of the American social pyramid, the old slogan of the labor
movement is gaining a new and terrible meaning: An injury to one is an
injury to all.
That’s why Out and Occupy, a new group of
gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and transgender people inspired by the
Occupy Wall Street movement, will be celebrating an early Valentine’s
Day on Feb. 11 with the hotel workers of Hyatt Andaz West Hollywood and
with members of the progressive labor union Unite Here.
We’ve had enough of a bad romance with corporate serial seducers, and
we’re breaking up with “gay friendly” businesses that don’t respect
workers of all sexual persuasions. I am not a saint of any kind nor a
professional revolutionary. My own case is simpler: I worked in some low
wage jobs when I was young, but today I am a middle-class writer who
prefers to travel and rest in comfort. But just step outside our doors
and what do we find? We are lost in the dark woods of the “free market,”
and the wolves do not just happen to be other human beings. No, they
happen to be the ruling class. So enough already with the ghastly
glamour of “arriving,” always upward and onward, in the same old grand
ballroom of grand illusions.
Click here for information about the event described in this column.
|
I am writing a public appeal for solidarity
with the hotel workers of Los Angeles, but you should know where I come
from. I do not digress, but I do insist on the personal dimension of
any political movement. I come from a family fractured in part by the
American class system, but also from a movement of radical social change
often dismissed to this day as a “wedge issue” and as “identity
politics.” To the Democratic Party I owe nothing, and to the
“progressives” who now urge us all to vote by rote for the candidates of
their choice I owe my continuing resistance. Barely 12 percent of
American workers are now members of labor unions, and the burden of
blame does not rest only with the Republican Party. If we measure the
evidence in truly historical scales of justice, then career politicians
of the Democratic Party also bear a heavy share of responsibility for
unleashing the “free market” on working people. Bill Clinton played a
leading role in the deregulation of banks and Wall Street. Barack Obama
rehired many of the old regime Clintonistas back into his campaign of
“hope and change.”
Nearly all hotel housekeepers are women,
and the majority are women of color and immigrants. Corporate hotel
chains such as Hyatt, Hilton, Starwood and Marriott have increased both
the amount and the pace of work done by housekeepers in recent years,
with high rates of injury documented by a team of researchers from four
universities and Unite Here in a 2009 article in the American Journal of
Industrial Medicine. Among 50 hotel properties of five companies
examined in the report, Hyatt housekeepers had the highest overall rate
of injuries. Lifting heavy mattresses, scrubbing bathroom floors and
clearing trash will take a physical toll on the sturdiest worker.
Understaffing and unsafe work conditions add to the dangers and
injuries. Housekeepers at some Hyatt hotels clean as many as 30 rooms a
day, nearly double the number generally required at hotels with good
union contracts.
Advertisement
<a
href='http://ads.truthdig.com/banners/www/delivery/ck.php?n=abee66dc&amp;cb=646401132'
target='_blank'><img
src='http://ads.truthdig.com/banners/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=8&amp;cb=646401132&amp;n=abee66dc'
border='0' alt='' /></a>
Contradictions? Certainly. Welcome to the
contradictions of class and immigrant labor that run through daily life
and the entire economy. Few of us are living lives of isolated virtue,
and what would be the point of virtue in isolation? Saving souls belongs
in the realm of faith, but economic justice does have an irreducibly
moral dimension. When we treat one another only as the means to personal
comfort and profit, the hidden injuries of class are openly advertised
in our own actions.
Every great movement for social change
includes fracture lines of class division and exploitation. The movement
for the human rights and social dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
queer and transgendered people is no exception. HRC’s Corporate Equality
Index gives the Hyatt Hotel chain a perfect score for domestic partner
benefits, health insurance and relocation expenses, and in addition
Hyatt has sponsored HyPride, described in a New York Times Business Day
Markets report of Dec. 8, 2011, as “an employee-networking group for
members and supporters of the LGBT community.”
Yet domestic partner benefits will not be
an immediate benefit to a housekeeper of any sexual persuasion who is
neither married nor domestically partnered, yet who may suffer serious
injuries through daily shifts of heavy lifting, scrubbing and pushing
carts through hallways. A housekeeper or a dishwasher crippled by severe
carpal tunnel syndrome may well need health insurance, but may not be
able to find a safer job. And for many immigrant workers, the notion of
relocation expenses may be quite remote—unless they are bumped out of
work entirely and are forced to pay to relocate out of their own
pockets.
This Corporate Equality Index is measuring a
package of benefits of greatest use to employees already placed on the
upper rungs of the corporate ladder. Indeed, by calculating quite
precisely the cost of such benefits, many companies are able to show the
friendly face of “equal opportunity” managers to a chosen spectrum of
customers. This is an essential element of “niche marketing” no matter
what particular group a business hopes to attract and no matter what the
demographic percentage may be. You do not have to be a gay socialist
(though I am) to wonder whether the Corporate Equality Index of the
Human Rights Campaign is an accurate measure of the defense of human
rights among workers rather than one more index of corporate inequality.
You only have to pay attention to the difference between the values and
principles advertised by career politicians and corporations and the
actual condition of the working classes in this country and beyond all
borders.
Managers are not members of the 1 percent,
much less the upper 10th of 1 percent—that stratosphere in which the
ruling class truly rules through both wealth and command of armed power.
Managers do, however, enforce corporate regulations upon workers below
them, as measured by the steep drops in wages, benefits and respect.
Even the kindest manager will sometimes have to choose between kindness
to a fellow worker and enforcing the corporate-command economy through
“the rules of the house.”
In the United States, we have even reached a
point where the number of women or African-Americans or gay people, for
example, who shatter “glass ceilings” in corporate headquarters is
regarded as a key index of social mobility and even of social equality.
We end up looking at a thousand fragments of upper management and the
upper class, all highly profiled and brightly glittering, without
finding in that shattered mirror any fair reflection of the power of
class and capital.
No comments:
Post a Comment