Hotel workers
Our union represents over 8,000 workers outside of New York City – including thousands of hotel workers across Long Island, Westchester, Albany, the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and the Finger Lakes.
The GRIWA contract
The contract for hotel workers in New York State is the Greater Regional Industry Wide Agreement, the “GRIWA.” After a decade of non-stop organizing and contentious bargaining, we now have every major employer in the region across over 100 hotels and casinos bound to the GRIWA.
In 2023, our union renegotiated the GRIWA. By all accounts, it was a record-breaking contract. It made the pages of The Wall Street Journal for raising wages by a jaw-dropping 40%, protecting health and retirement benefits, and introducing several groundbreaking new provisions, including paid family leave for new parents, free legal assistance, and brand new child care and housing funds.
How we transformed New York's hotel jobs
For many years, hotel workers outside of New York City made a fraction of what hotel workers in the City made. In New York State, low wages kept hotel workers in poverty, benefits were nearly non-existent, and working conditions in hotels were backbreaking and unsafe. That’s because few hotels outside of NYC were unionized; and even in those few, the previous unions that represented them were too weak and unwilling (or unable) to fight for good contracts.
This all changed when our union expanded our jurisdiction to represent workers across Long Island, Westchester, Albany, the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and the Finger Lakes. We have carried out a strategic plan to build power – power that we used to turn those hotel jobs into good, middle-class jobs.
In 2010, our union was asked to step in and represent hotel workers upstate. In order to set new standards for hospitality workers across the region – with the kind of language and protections that our union has in New York City – we needed to negotiate a new master contract.
This effort began with renegotiating and improving the contracts at the few union hotels in the region. One by one, we engaged in painstaking negotiations, involved our newest members, and made major improvements to the old contracts, nearly all of which were long expired.
In each of these individual contracts, we were setting new standards that would ultimately come together to form the basis for a new master contract. Several years later, in 2013, in a historic moment for our union, we signed the first GRIWA with just four hotels.
While the first GRIWA set a much higher standard for hotel workers in the area, we knew that the only way to significantly raise wages and meaningfully improve benefits would be to organize the non-union industry and increase our union density. When we represent the majority of hotels in a given region, we bring more leverage to the bargaining table – which translates into higher wages for our members and more money for their benefits.
We set out to organize the non-union industry across New Jersey, Long Island, and Upstate New York. And after years of tireless organizing, today we have over 100 hotels and casinos signed onto the GRIWA.
We’ve mobilized thousands of members to vote and knock on doors for pro-union candidates — with tremendous success. As a result, we’ve built real political influence at the local and state levels.
We’ve used this hard-fought influence to push for laws that protect our members — from winning labor peace for casinos that open across New York, to making dramatic improvements to unemployment benefits statewide, to local Consumer Protection Laws which require hotels to notify guests of a union strike or picket line ahead of their stay.
Albany is a union town
Following a number of contentious and public fights at the bargaining table and ongoing efforts to organize new hotels and casinos in the Capital District, our union celebrates 100% union density in downtown Albany!