by Julia Wong

Wanxia Ma (back right) and 79 other hotel workers and allies engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at San Francisco's Grand Hyatt hotel.

Hotel housekeepers are rarely seen, let alone heard. A neatly uniformed woman pushing an enormous cart of linens, towels, and cleaning supplies down a hallway; the occasional knock on the door and soft cry of “Housekeeping,” when you’ve slept in: this is the only evidence most hotel guests ever get of the women who create the luxurious environs of hotel rooms. But for the past three weeks, Wanxia Ma, a thirty-nine-year-old housekeeper at San Francisco’s storied Fairmont Hotel, has traded in her quiet mop for a picket-line drum, joining other hotel workers in a nationwide campaign to achieve justice for Hyatt workers.

Wanxia is one of dozens of housekeepers who have taken leaves of absence from their hotel jobs this summer to speak out about the abuse housekeepers in union and non-union Hyatt hotels face every day. In San Francisco, Chicago, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C., these women are fighting on behalf of workers in non-union Hyatts who are trying to achieve a fair process to form a union without fear of intimidation and threats from management but can rarely speak out for fear they will lose their jobs. Wanxia and her sister room cleaners spend every day meeting with community groups, members of the clergy, and Hyatt customers to tell their stories and enlist the groups’ support. Recently a group of rabbis investigated working conditions at Hyatt hotels around the country and declared Hyatt non-Kosher. For details on their investigation and a copy of their report, see www.justiceathyatt.org.

As a room cleaner at the Fairmont, a union hotel, Wanxia already has the security of a new contract that will cover the next few years. Not only did Fairmont workers win wage increases, fully-paid health care, and an improved pension, but they also beat back the hotel owners’ plan to convert half the hotel to condos, a plan that would have killed half the jobs at the hotel. But Wanxia knows the plight of housekeepers at non-union hotels like the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, and she’s using her voice and her story to advocate for them.

After immigrating to the United States in 2001, Wanxia got a job as a room cleaner at the Hotel Palomar, a non-union hotel in San Francisco. She describes her experience: “I didn’t know about the protections of a union, and I didn’t have a voice to communicate with my managers. We would work eight-hour shifts, but if a customer chose not to get their room cleaned, the hotel would cut our pay by thirty minutes even though we were there to work. I knew if I argued with management they would pick on me and give me harder jobs.” Wanxia was supposed to qualify for full-time employment and benefits after three months on the job, but her manager told her that she hadn’t worked enough and extended her probation period by another three months. When she was finally eligible for health care, it cost $175 a month. She paid the significant chunk of her wages because she was scared of getting hurt.

One day, Wanxia got a terrible headache and stomach pains. She went to the doctor and discovered that she had an ectopic pregnancy, a life-threatening condition that requires emergency surgery. When she went to use the health insurance she had been paying so much for, however, she discovered that her managers had ended the insurance because they claimed she was a part-time worker. Scared and in terrible pain, she had to go to a low-income hospital in Chinatown where government assistance would cover the operation. The insurance she’d been paying for didn’t cover any of the cost.

“My story is an example of the importance of having a union,” Wanxia says. “It’s hard work. Sometimes when I get home all I can do is lay on my back for hours. I can’t sleep because of the pain. But with the union I have free health care. I have a pension, I have job security, and I know if something unfair happens the union will help me fight back. It takes away some of the stress.” This is the security Wanxia is fighting to help workers at the Hyatt Fisherman’s Wharf and other non-union Hyatts around the country achieve.

Wanxia and the other room cleaners have already persuaded 42 community organizations to endorse the worker-called boycotts of the three San Francisco Hyatt hotels. They have moved most of those groups to take meaningful action to support the campaign. Community groups have begun calling Hyatt customers to tell them about their meetings with San Francisco hotel workers and ask them to honor the boycott as well. Other groups participated in the July 21 Hyatt National Day of Action by walking the picket line at the Grand Hyatt and, in several cases, engaging in civil disobedience and taking arrest alongside hotel workers like Wanxia.

Even with the backing of the union, it has not been easy for Wanxia to overcome the societal and cultural norms that tell people like her — low-wage, immigrant women who don’t speak perfect English — to shut up, quit complaining, and just focus on making beds and cleaning toilets. When Wanxia first began working with the union, she kept her head down and her face covered with a hat, even as she banged on a drum or chanted on a picket line. Over time, she grew comfortable challenging customers who violate the boycott. When she decided to take a leave of absence to speak out against Hyatt’s abuse, her own family placed enormous pressure on her to quit the program and return to her silent, non-challenging role in the hotel. But two days after acceding to their request, Wanxia was back at the union hall ready to speak out again.

Julia Wong works for UNITE HERE! Local 2, the hospitality workers union in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. Local 2 represents about 12,000 workers — room cleaners, cooks, bartenders, bellmen, servers, bussers, and dishwashers — in hotels, restaurants, food services, laundries, and the San Francisco International Airport.