Hotel employees to take strike vote
Employees at four Boston hotels are set to vote tomorrow on whether to authorize a strike.
Members of Unite Here Local 26 who work at the Boston Park Plaza, Sheraton Boston, Westin Copley Place, and Westin Waterfront will be casting secret ballots at the union's Chinatown headquarters between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. The local will also be setting up booths to dispense information about how members can receive food and mortgage assistance, as well as other social services, if they vote to strike.
A citywide contract for the hotel-workers union expired last Nov. 31, and negotiations between the local and the hotels' owner, Starwood Corp., have failed to yield a new pact. The union said it is seeking increased wages, a better retirement plan, affordable health insurance, and less stressful workloads for members. The terms of any Local 26-Starwood contract would be honored by all other union locals representing hotel workers in Boston, Local 26 said.
The four hotels have a total of 3,700 rooms.
Starwood attorney L. Robert Batterman of Proskauer Rose LLP said the company has "not been given any strike deadline, and negotiations have been ongoing for months and continue to be."
Some issues have been settled for months, he said, including health insurance funding and room-cleaning workload quotas.
"What we're talking about at this point is the size of the wage increase and the size of the retirement benefit increase,'' Batterman said.
(By Peter J. Howe, Globe staff)
