A nine-week, multi-city strike involving thousands of workers at the Marriott hotel chain came to an end Monday as employees in San Francisco reached a settlement with the company.
About 2,500 Marriott employees in San Francisco reached a settlement early Monday with the nation’s largest hotel chain, making it the last of eight cities to do so and officially ending the strike, according to a release from Unite Here, the union representing Marriott’s employees.
The newly negotiated contract included wage and benefit increases, as well as sexual harassment and other protections. The workers in San Francisco had been on strike for over 60 days, according to the union.
In early October, nearly 8,000 Marriott workers ― front desk personnel, housekeepers, servers, bartenders and other service employees ― walked off the job at the hotel’s properties in Boston and Detroit, in the California cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and San Diego, and in Hawaii’s Honolulu and Lahaina.
“Today… marks the beginning of a new standard for hotel workers in North America, and has made Marriott a leader in the hospitality industry in ensuring that one job is enough for hotel workers to live on with dignity,” Unite Here President D. Taylor said in a release, calling the strike the “largest hotel worker strike in modern American history.”
Nia Winston, president of Unite Here Local 24 in Detroit, told HuffPost in October that a lot of Marriott employees had to take second jobs in order to make ends meet.
In September, Marriott reported a profit of $610 million for the second quarter, up 25 percent from the previous year.
Amid ongoing strikes last week, Marriott also announced that a major data breach had exposed the private information of up to 500 million of its guests, saying that hackers had illegally accessed the company’s Starwood Hotels brand’s reservation database since 2014.
Many of the Marriott employees who had been on strike in other cities reached new contract agreements last month and have already returned to work.
Workers in San Francisco were expected to vote on ― and “overwhelmingly approve” ― the new contract later Monday, the union said. Employees were expected to return to work Wednesday.