We can improve yours, too. If you are interested in joining our union, take the first step: contact an organizer. It's confidential.
Union hotel and casino jobs are great jobs. Every year, our union organizes many non-union hotels and casinos, helping thousands of workers to change their lives.
Together, with our help, you can bring the union into your workplace too.
Union workers have the right to negotiate with their bosses over pretty much anything that affects them at work - from challenging unfair rules to demanding better wages, benefits, and working conditions. With the union, everything is negotiable, and that’s a great right for working people to have.
For nearly a century, our union has been fighting for hospitality workers to earn enough to live the American dream. Today, most union hotel workers in New York City earn nearly $40 an hour - double what many hotel workers make without a union.
Union workers have job security – from the right to a representative when being disciplined to the right to a fair hearing when facing termination. Not only that, our contracts protect the jobs of union workers from hotel sales, changes in management, unfair layoffs, short-staffing, outsourcing, new technology, and more.
Union hotel and casino workers have high-quality family healthcare, an employer-funded pension plan, access to free attorneys through our pre-paid legal fund, a college scholarship fund, and a free job training program.
The National Labor Relations Act is a federal law that provides workers with the right to join a union. Under Section 7 of the Act, workers have "the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining..." In other words, it's your federally protected right to organize.
Read through your employee handbook and you will find something we call management's "escape clause." It states that the employee handbook is not a contract between the employer and the employee, and that management has the right to change or ignore any promises they make in the handbook, whenever they want to.
Non-union workers have very few legal rights. In New York and New Jersey, the law says that if you don't have a contract with your employer, your boss can fire you for almost any reason or even for no reason at all. This is called "employment at-will." In reality, this means that non-union workers can't stand up for themselves. Without a union contract or job security, management can reduce your hours or change your schedule at any time without notice, increase your workload without limit, and reduce or eliminate your benefits.
A union contract is a binding legal document that we can actually enforce. All of our contracts guarantee that union workers have:
One of the most direct ways you can change your life – and secure higher pay, affordable healthcare, and dignity and respect at work – is to organize your workplace.
At the Gansevoort, a hotel in Manhattan's meatpacking district, workers had the courage to organize the union and take control of their lives.