The Hotel Trades Council wants both: it wants to force all hotels in the city to employ only union members and not to allow outside contractors – even though the union itself spends millions every year on outsourcing services, including to non-union companies.
HTC has spent more than $700,000 on maintenance and cleaning contracts over the past decade, plus millions more on legal, consulting and computer services.
Meanwhile, City Councilwoman Julie Menin and the HTC are pushing the unionization bill, whose primary goal is to curb sex trafficking and other criminal behavior – hence the misleading name “Safe Hotel Act.”
Curiously, Menin points to increasing hotel-related 311 calls (not 911) as an indication of a growing security problem.
But the American Hotel and Lodging Association points out that most 311 complaints involving hotels or motels “relate to illegal parking, noise, garbage disposal, broken elevators, blocked driveways and problems related to homelessness.”
Forcing the city’s 400 non-union hotels to hand over management of their workforces to HTC would not solve these problems.
But it would force some owners to close their shops, And make hotel rooms more expensive in NYC, which is already one of the most expensive in the country (only Boston is more expensive).
And so a tourism industry that is already suffering from the city is weakened even further. real Crime crisis and COVID lockdowns.
The bill is another shot in the city’s economy and a gift to a special interest group, as it puts all of the city’s hotels under the thumb of a single union.
A union that does not even live by the rules it wants to impose on the industry.
