Hotel Boycott Is a High-Stakes Battle for Union

City Hall staffers and others who gravitate to the New Otani Hotel & Garden in downtown Los Angeles are confronting an unsettling obstacle: pickets urging would-be customers not to patronize the Little Tokyo hostelry and its popular restaurants.

“Boycott! Boycott!” a phalanx of exuberant protesters chanted as a busload of shaken Japanese tourists was hustled inside the 20-story hotel, situated across 1st Street from Los Angeles’ government core.

The boycott is the most public manifestation of a bruising labor battle that pits a maverick Los Angeles local representing mostly Latino immigrants against the nonunion New Otani’s Japanese owners and operators. The escalating conflict has drawn national attention in this post-industrial era of dwindling union membership, plummeting real wages and an increasingly global economy.

John Sweeney, new president of the AFL-CIO and a strong proponent of grass-roots organizing, has called the struggle “one of the most important efforts to organize low-wage workers in Southern California today, as well as one of the highest-profile, current organizing campaigns in the United States involving a Japanese-owned business.”

For union advocates, the high-stakes boycott signals the decisive phase of a watershed fight in an industry--and a city--long hostile to organized labor. The outcome, boycott backers say, will go a long way toward determining whether a newly resurgent union activism will take root among the mostly immigrant work force that underpins Southern California’s multibillion-dollar tourism industry.

From the standpoint of management, the conflict is also one of high principle: Standing up against a “lawless” union that employs “terror tactics” to browbeat employees hostile to union overtures.

Union strategists, outlining a kind of urban version of Cesar Chavez’s heralded grape boycott, predict that the New Otani action will lend impetus to workers’ demands for improved conditions at other nonunion hotels and restaurants, while quelling persistent pressures for salary and benefit cutbacks at union facilities.

“Our people can’t afford any more reductions in their living standards; they’re barely surviving right now,” said Maria Elena Durazo, president of Local 11 of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union, known for its use of street theater, civil disobedience and other high-profile tactics.

Now that the union has thrown down the gauntlet at the New Otani, a defeat would be a devastating blow to Local 11’s prestige--and a potent weapon for employers and detractors.

Hitting at the hotel’s home base, Local 11 has dispatched a delegation to Japan to enlist support for New Otani employees and has publicly excoriated a record of war crimes and other alleged misdeeds by the Kajima Corp., the Japanese construction conglomerate that owns a controlling interest in the hotel’s parent company.

To kick off the boycott, pickets threw up a “Wall of Shame” outside the New Otani, linking Kajima to slave labor in World War II-era mines, forcible evictions of Little Tokyo residents during the 1970s and the firing last year of three pro-union room attendants.

Kenji Yoshimoto, the New Otani’s executive vice president and general manager, called Kajima’s history irrelevant to the hotel issue and said the firings were for just cause.

Local 11 has won boycott pledges from seven City Council members, three congressional representatives and county Supervisor Gloria Molina. It also has enlisted support from Latino and Asian American activists, the clergy and unions representing tens of thousands of city and county employees. The union plans to conduct regular picketing and contact travel agents, corporations and other potential hotel customers in the United States and Japan.

New Otani management says it is confident in its ability to weather the boycott, which comes just as room occupancy rates are edging up after years of industry red ink linked to Southern California’s sluggish economy.

“The union’s latest bizarre behavior can only set back efforts for all businessmen and women in the city of Los Angeles who work long and hard to develop a future local economy based on a strong and harmonious multicultural work force,” said Yoshimoto, a self-described “corporate gypsy” and golf-loving citizen of Japan who has been with the New Otani since it opened 19 years ago.

Despite the union’s depiction of him as the embodiment of an exploitative corporate boss, Yoshimoto, 54, says he is “at peace.”

Yoshimoto and Karl A. Schmidt, the New Otani attorney, charged during an interview that the boycott is designed to force the company to negotiate with Local 11. Management favors an alternative: a secret-ballot employee election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. The union, under its old-guard leadership, lost such a vote at the New Otani in 1982; Yoshimoto predicts a similar outcome if an election is held this time.

But Durazo of Local 11 says a management-created “climate of intimidation” at the New Otani now renders a free election impossible.

Management blames the union for the prevailing tension. In court papers, the New Otani has accused Local 11 of “intimidation, coupled with overt harassment and implied threats” during its almost three-year-long organizing campaign. Local 11 denies the charges.

On the Little Tokyo picket line, New Otani employees enumerated their principal concerns: costly medical benefits, the lack of a pension plan and shaky job security. (New Otani pay scales are similar to those at union hotels, though Local 11 says salaries and raises are much more arbitrary than at union hotels--a charge disputed by management.)

“The boycott is the price we have to pay to gain respect,” said Maria Vargas, who has toiled at the New Otani since 1977.

She earns $7.10 hourly for cleaning up to 16 rooms a day; she says the volume of work has risen steadily, while benefits have been scaled back.

Under the New Otani health plan, Vargas says, she must pay more than $100 a month to provide health insurance for her and her children. Other employees say they cannot afford family health coverage and must turn to county health facilities. (Under Local 11 contracts, employers pick up the tab for family health coverage.)

It is the insurance issue that has particularly enraged many elected officials in a county where the public health care system is verging on fiscal collapse--in no small part because of the proliferation of patients without coverage.

“We can’t afford to subsidize wealthy corporations like the New Otani that don’t want to contribute their fair share,” said pro-boycott Councilman Mike Hernandez.

Clearly exasperating management is Local 11’s successful cultivation of the City Council. In 1994, Yoshimoto wrote to Councilman Richard Alatorre, another Local 11 partisan, noting that many hotel workers “are of Hispanic origin, born in other countries, and not yet as sophisticated as some others”--statements immediately denounced as racist.

As the boycott began, Yoshimoto issued a “clarification,” noting, “The word ‘sophisticated’ was not the best choice to describe how these workers might understand what was being done to them.”