Lucy Wong and Lupe Chavez are the faces of labor activism in today’s San Francisco — the workers who have inherited the legacy of the 1934 General Strike and the rise of the longshoremen. Wong and Chavez are immigrant women from the two countries that have contributed a new generation of workers and union militants to the city’s labor movement — China and El Salvador.
On Sept. 24, the two marched with 1,000 others outside the hotels where they work, making beds and cleaning up after San Francisco’s number one source of revenue: tourists. Their employers are not local owners of big hotels, as they might have been decades ago. Instead, they are giant corporations that manage properties across the globe — Hyatt, Westin, Hilton, Intercontinental and Starwood.
To even the odds between local workers and global employers, Wong, Chavez and their union, UNITE HERE Local 2, have developed new tactics for labor protests. The most important is the mass mobilization of workers and supporters, culminating in civil disobedience. Dozens of arrests are designed to send a message, not just to the Hyatt and Westin chains where the sit-ins took place, but also to the political powers in the city. Without a new contract, the union is prepared to disrupt the normal order of business, just as the longshoremen did on the waterfront 80 years ago.
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