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2023 GRIWA: How We Won Our Best Renewal Contract Yet

The 2023 GRIWA 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 our first ever child care and housing funds.

The gains in the latest GRIWA are unprecedented. But we didn’t win them overnight. These negotiations were part of a 15-year strategic plan to build regional power over the hospitality industry.

We knew that if we were going to be successful in transforming the lives of hospitality workers outside of New York City, we would need to bring more leverage to the bargaining table. That meant we needed to unite our members to achieve several major objectives: negotiate a new master contract and, for the first time, set fair standards for hotel workers across the greater region; organize a large number of non-union hotels to increase our union density; and build a political program in the region in order to pass targeted laws to protect our members.

In 2013, in a historic moment for our union, we signed the first GRIWA master contract with only four hotels. The first GRIWA came with crucial new rights on the job including stronger job protections, stable and predictable schedules, and an effective grievance and arbitration system for enforcing the contract and resolving disputes. But while the first GRIWA set a new, much higher standard for hotel workers in the area, there was much more to be done.

In order to build more leverage over the region, we set out to organize the non-union industry across New Jersey, Long Island, and Upstate New York. And after a decade of non-stop organizing and contentious bargaining, we now have every major employer in the region across 99 hotels and casinos bound to the GRIWA.

Over the past decade, we’ve also mobilized thousands of members to vote, canvass, and lobby their local leaders — with tremendous success. We’ve built real political influence at the local and state level across New York and New Jersey. We’ve used this hard-fought influence to push for laws that protect our members.

Setting the table for 2023 negotiations, we finally had all of the elements that we needed: we had a well-established master contract; we had dramatically increased our union density (with some areas achieving even greater density than we have in New York City); and we had made calculated moves using our political power.

Combined, these tools gave us the ability to significantly raise wages and win unprecedented gains in benefits at the bargaining table. Factor in the security and rights we won on the job, and this GRIWA is one of the most exceptional contracts in the 100-year history of our union.

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