You are reading: Hotel Voice Summer 2025

Organizing workers in non-union hotels is at the heart of our mission to help hotel workers better their lives by winning union representation. But organizing non-union hotels also impacts our existing members. Organizing affects how much power we bring to the bargaining table because it protects our high union density

High union density means more leverage

We calculate our density by comparing the number of hotel rooms that are in union hotels versus non-union hotels. In other words, it’s the percentage of the hotel market that is union. Union density directly correlates to wage rates. The higher a union’s density, the higher the wages they can win.

Because we represent the overwhelming majority of the NYC hotel industry, we’ve been able to demand the highest wages, protect our benefits, and secure the strongest contractual rights anywhere in the world for hotel workers. There are a few reasons why high density makes a difference at the bargaining table.

For one, there is strength in numbers. This is the basis of all union power: workers have more power when they come together to fight than any one worker has fighting management alone. In the same way, the more workers and hotels our union represents, the more power we have. Our union engages in multi-employer bargaining – which is to say that we don’t negotiate individual contracts hotel by hotel. Instead, we negotiate a single master contract with the entire unionized hotel industry in NYC. This means that in 2026, instead of representing just 50 workers at one hotel and 200 at another, we will come to the table representing nearly 30,000 members across over 250 hotels, united in their fight for a fair contract.

Higher density also allows us to demand higher wages with-out puting a company at a competitive disadvantage. Labor is by far a hotel’s largest expense. What is awful for workers is generally good for hotel profits. Non-union hotels in New York City pocket an estimated 50% more than union hotels by not having to follow our union contract. It’s not just that non-union wages are, on average, half those of union hotels. It’s also that non-union hotels save money by offering worse healthcare and retirement benefits, demanding more work from fewer employees, and sending workers home without pay when it’s not busy. As a result, non-union hotels are able to undercut union hotels. If the majority of the NYC hotel industry was non-union, it would obviously put union hotels at a steep disadvantage. But, because the majority is union and we’re making most hotels agree to the same wages, benefits, and work rules, management can’t legitimately claim that signing our contract would make them so uncompetitive that they would have to close.

Increasing our union density is difficult

Protecting our high density has been a top priority of our union for many years – and it has become increasingly harder to do. The labor laws that were created to protect the rights of workers to organize have gotten weaker and, in many cases, have even been turned against workers. At the same time, an unprecedented boom in new hotel development had flooded the NYC hotel market over the last two decades. So even as we organize at a record pace, we haven’t been able to keep up with a tsunami of new development.

In 2008 there were 59,459 hotel rooms in New York City. By the end of 2021, with roughly 4,500 new hotel rooms added in New York City every year, the number of hotel rooms in the city had nearly doubled.

Twenty years ago, new hotel development in New York City exploded across the five boroughs. Developers were putting up hotels seemingly overnight – without any community input or oversight. It was the wild west, and it created a whole host of problems for New Yorkers. Many of these new hotels became hotbeds of crime, prostitution, and drugs in residential communities. They also oversaturated the hotel market, which was bad for the hotel industry.

This unchecked over-development also had a ripple effect that directly impacted our union: we couldn’t organize hotels as quickly as they opened, which threatened our high union density. Every new hotel that opened, opened non-union. These hotels had every incentive to fight to keep it that way. The cost of a union contract would not just be higher wages. It would be our pension plan, our family healthcare, reasonable workloads and all of the rules that prevent management from treating hotel workers like they are on-call and squeezing as much work as possible out of them.

The solution

Like many challenges our union takes on, we had to attack this problem in multiple ways. Most obviously, we needed to increase our organizing efforts and help these workers join our union. But organizing is often extraordinarily difficult and time intensive – it can take years to organize a single hotel. There was just no way to keep up with the opening of new hotels. If we were going to stand a chance at addressing this danger, we knew that we needed to be able to push for smarter local laws and regulations.

In 2017, our union organized a record-breaking number of non-union properties and grew our membership by almost 10%. But it didn’t increase our density. Because that same year, 4,500 new hotel rooms entered the NYC market – and they all opened non-union.

Why is organizing so hard?

William Vale Hotel

In July of 2021, workers in the housekeeping department at the William Vale came to our union looking for help. They were overworked, cleaning up to 21 rooms a day, and underpaid, with many workers making less than $20 an hour.

In their very first meeting, our organizers explained to the workers: this would not be easy. Because while 90 years ago, the National Labor Relations Act guaranteed workers the right to organize a union – after decades of attack, the law is weak and does little to prevent employers from terrorizing workers during an organizing drive.

So, for over a year, our union organizers met with the workers in secret and prepared them for the aggressive anti-union campaign to come. Sure enough, as soon as our union requested a government-run election, management’s campaign began. The hotel hired consultants to pressure workers to vote against the union and forced them to attend over 100 captive audience meetings, where the consultants lied about our contract and begged workers to give them a “second chance.” When those tactics didn’t hurt union support, the hotel tried to rig the vote by hiring suspected family and friends of the then-owner.

Despite it all, the workers at the William Vale won their union election in October 2022. But management refused to back down – requesting a new election due to a simple administrative mistake made by the government. Five months later, the government scheduled a second vote. In February 2023, the workers again voted for the union by a resounding 83%. Finally, the workers had union recognition. But as our members know, the fight isn’t over until you have a union contract. It wasn’t for another year, and nearly three years after first showing up at our union’s headquarters, that the William Vale workers won their first union contract.

The story of the William Vale is not unusual. Unless our union can make a company sign a neutrality agreement that prohibits the hotel from running an anti-union campaign, organizing is very hard. It takes tremendous guts and determination on the part of the workers, and it takes countless hours of work from the union’s organizers, lawyers, and negotiators.

Our union’s organizing department does not rest.

These hotels in New York City have joined our union over the past decade.