Feature Archives

On November 13th, students at UC Santa Cruz conducted a study-in at the Science and Engineering Library. Due to budget cuts, both of the large UCSC libraries have severely reduced hours which detrimentally affects employee pay and students with study needs late at night.

On September 24th, 1700 hotel workers in Unite Here! Local 2 and their supporters marched around union square to demand a fair contract with a number of San Francisco hotels. Ninety-two union members and others were arrested for blocking the entrances at the St. Francis Westin and the Grand Hyatt.

On Thursday, September 24th, actions against the budget cuts, fee hikes, layoffs and furloughs at University of California campuses took place throughout the UC system. Workers, graduate student employees, students and faculty held a strike, walked out, and demonstrated in defense of public education and fair labor practices. Pickets, rallies and general assemblies took place from 6am onwards on the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz campuses.

More than a thousand hotel workers and their supporters marched through downtown San Francisco on Monday, September 7th, to demand a fair contract in their ongoing negotiations with the city's hotels. The Unite Here! Local 2 march started at the Embarcadero Hyatt to draw attention to the refusal by Hyatt to allow a fair process that would allow the workers at the Hyatt Fisherman's Wharf to have union representation. The march proceeded to HEI Le Meridien that is also a non-union hotel in the heart of downtown.

Flyers were posted in the windows of San Francisco's 24th Street Real Food grocery store as a reminder that this Labor Day was the 6th anniversary of the store closure that shut down their efforts to join a union and cost all 31 employees their jobs. The "Real Food Company" was a popular community natural food store in the heart of Noe Valley. Terminated employees, however, said that the closure was undertaken to prevent them from joining a union. The workers have gone on with their lives, as they await a related court decision.

On Friday, August 14th, hotel workers from Unite Here Local 2 rallied and marched for a new contract that preserves affordable health care and job security. Contracts covering 9,000 Local 2 members are expiring, and hotel workers are gearing up to fight employer attempts to undermine work and living standards in the San Francisco hotel industry. In their 2004 contract negotiations, more than 4,000 Local 2 members endured a 53-day strike and lockout that ultimately led to the contract now expiring.

On Monday, July 6th, labor activists gathered at Harry Bridges Plaza in the Embarcadero to remember the day, July 5, 1934, when two strikers were gunned down and killed by police. Several hundred union members and their supporters, many from around the world, marched in a reenacted funeral procession of the fallen men, Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise. As the procession passed the memorial at Mission and Steuart Streets, across the street from the site of the deaths, they took off their hats.