Four-star hotel discord
Maria Semedo is a housekeeper at the Sheraton Boston Hotel, where rooms routinely go for more than $150 a night.
Semedo, 42, has worked at the hotel since 1988, shortly after she moved to Boston from Cape Verde. Over the years, she said yesterday, cleaning 16 rooms a day has taken a physical toll.
"I have a pain in my back," she said. "In July 2005, I fell and hurt my head and leg, and my leg is still numb. So, I feel like, when I am 50, I won't be able to work anymore, because I have a bad back."
Semedo was one of hundreds of hotel workers streaming into their union headquarters on Harrison Avenue yesterday. They were voting on whether to authorize a strike against Starwood Hotels and Resorts, owners of four major Boston hotels, and the results announced last evening were overwhelming in favor of a strike, with 1,013 members in favor and only 27 opposed.
The hotels -- the Boston Park Plaza, the Sheraton Boston, the Westin Copley Place , and the Westin Boston Waterfront -- and their employees have been at odds since November, when the previous contract expired.
Aside from more money, the employees are seeking a better retirement package, better healthcare, and lighter workloads.
The workers said they were battling the trend of an industry whose mantra has become "do more with less." Smaller workforces and improved amenities for guests have increased their workloads greatly, they said, but what they are paid for that work -- from kitchen duties to housekeeping -- has changed little.
Unite HERE Local 26 president Janice Loux took me into a room where charts detailing strike plans lined the walls.
Workers will receive $200 a week during a strike she said; they will be expected to pull shifts on the picket line or to perform other duties such as making meals for those on the lines. If the strike vote is just a bluff, a great deal of planning seems to have gone into it.
"We don't want to take people into the street, but their patience is growing thin," Loux said. "We're very organized, and ready to go."
Labor disputes are almost routine in Boston, but this one has come unusually close to boiling over.
One nonmonetary issue at the table involves the near-disappearance of African-Americans from local hotels. The union says the four hotels Starwood owns employ only 32, out of a workforce of about 1,300, and that most of them have been in their jobs for well over a decade.
Loux theorizes that the hotels prefer to hire immigrants because they are less insistent on asserting their rights as employees. The company says it is willing to increase its efforts to hire black workers.
Starwood's lead negotiator, Robert Batterman, told me yesterday that the company basically regards the vote as saber-rattling, and that he believes there will be a contract settlement. He suggested any union worth its stationery could rouse its members to vote to authorize a strike.
"It doesn't mean there will be a strike," Batterman said. "It just means they can come in and pound the table and say, 'My people have authorized a strike.' We knew they would get a strike vote."
He contended the company has already agreed to much of what the union has asked for, though he acknowledged that the sides remain far apart on the pension issue.
The union is urging companies to stop putting employees and guests up at the hotels if the labor issue is not resolved soon.
Batterman admitted that the boycott threat isn't an idle one, though he added that it would hurt union members, too, by depriving them of tips and, eventually, jobs.
Most of the core issues of this impasse are as old as organized labor. But an actual strike, which has become a rarity here, seemed like a very real possibility yesterday. The union's members said the work they do is wearing them out, and they seemed very tired of Starwood, too.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
