From Fault Lines - Downtown San Francisco is quiet these days, no more are the hoarse cries of picketing hotel workers to be heard along Market street, in Nob Hill and the Financial District, where members of UNITE-HERE Local 2 were locked out for 38 days following a contract dispute. Yet whatever happens after the 60-day “cooling off” period brokered by Mayor Newsom, San Francisco has changed, and is changing. “San Francisco is a union town”, went one of the union’s chants during the lockout. The support that ordinary people lent to the striking workers suggests that this was no idle boast. But the strike and subsequent lockout of roughly 4,300 hotel workers here is not an isolated incident, nor is this particular to San Francisco. These issues are part of an ever-increasing trend in America today of labor struggles moving into retail and the so-called ‘service industry’.

It is hardly news in the U.S. today that our economy has moved from goods, that is, the production of tangible objects such as cars, televisions and lumber, to the service economy. This was hailed as a boon in the '90s, when the service jobs that were created were largely in high-tech, including internet jobs. After the dot-com bubble burst and the recession that followed in the wake of September 11, the jobs created have largely been ‘service industry’ jobs. Even conservative publications like the Economist admit that many of these are “McJobs”, a phrase coined by author Douglass Coupland in the 1991 novel ‘Generation X’ to describe “low-pay, low-benefit, low-prestige service industry jobs.” Read Full Article