Sep 18 2009
Louisville Hyatt for CCCC? Nope
So I’ll be attending the CCCC conference again next year, ready with my little pen and pad to add to my list. OK, maybe not, but it is an opportunity to see that rarest of rare birds – called Chance to Actually Affect Disgusting Corporate Practice. You see, the Hyatt in Boston axed their entire housekeeping staff on August 31 of this year – after tricking them into training their outsourced replacements. On NPR this morning, a woman who had worked for Hyatt for 21 years – since she was 19 years old – discussed her firing. So, basically her whole adult life thus far has been devoted to this organization, and they pretend the recession means that they should drop her $15 an hour and 401K contributions in favor of much cheaper labor? Um, uh uh. So 4C’s has contracted with both the Hyatt and the Marriott in Louisville for reduced rates; they’re the two main hotels being suggested by the conference. Here’s a stark choice. But it’s easy enough to say No! to the Hyatt and their outrageous labor practices in this case, and tell them precisely why (with specific notes sent to national, the Louisville Hyatt in particular, and the Boston Hyatt in particular). I think it’s also important for the conference organizers to revisit their deal with the Hyatt in light of a decision which very clearly conflicts with the values espoused by the organization, if not with standing resolutions and position statements. Let’s remember that we often go to these conferences – mostly on the Employer Institution’s dime, which means many of us even pay with money that comes ultimately from union households – and, good Lord, but we hear a lot about writing for social change and resistance and agency and all kinds of stuff like that. Well, here you go. Write a note when you book elsewhere, and maybe these folks can get their jobs back on equitable terms.
Is Marriott much better? It might very well be, and I don’t want to say that all hotels are the same, because I know a lot of academic organizations have very comprehensive policies about how they choose hotels. Not just the specific hotel, but also the whole site for the conference — the city and state, because city and state laws affect the labor practices at specific hotels owned by large multinational corporations. In other words, not all Hyatts will be the same. One of the factors that goes into that choice of a conference site is the labor conditions. I believe the MLA and the ASA consider labor conditions, but I would need to check to make sure.
However, those kinds of policies are brought about if and only if the members of the organization ask for them. For instance, the Radical Caucus at the MLA often proposes a lot of “resolutions” and “motions” that ask the MLA to boycott this, or go on record as saying that. And the MLA’s delegate assembly votes on them. For instance, officially, the MLA is on record as supporting not just graduate student labor rights, but all labor rights. And that resolution is published in the PMLA. But that’s just a resolution, which doesn’t necessarily lead to any specific action. Motions are more tricky and often get rejected for constitutional reasons. For instance, the Caucus wanted the MLA to exclude NYU when that university didn’t honor its contractual agreement with the graduate student union, but that motion didn’t even get to the delegate assembly because the MLA constitutionally can’t do things like that. (Personally, I think the MLA can do things like that, but I was told by the MLA Exec that it can’t. In any case, we were allowed to discuss it at the delegate assembly, so at the very least everyone got to express some anger.) The Caucus also wanted the MLA to boycott Israeli universities because of the Israeli government’s policy on Palestinians. (I personally was against this motion, because the same principles one would cite for boycotting Israeli universities would force one to also boycott American universities because of Guatanamo Bay, the invastion of Iraq, etc. For me, the motion didn’t make any sense.)
Yes, I thought about that, but at the end of the day I don’t care whether Marriott is much better. In all likelihood, it’s not. But you pick and choose specifics, and act on those. If we spend a lot of time waiting around for the better massive hotel chain, nothing gets done. In this case, it’s even more clear, since Hyatt filed an S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early August, which suggests that any labor moves made at the end of August are part and parcel of a general labor strategy once the company goes public. In this sense, the Boston firings could be a test case for the public reaction, so the public should react negatively. It is a perception sensitive industry after all.
As for organizational response, NCTE apparently investigated the matter briefly and made two determinations: first, there are no apparent labor issues at the Louisville Hyatt Regency, so the incident in question would not go directly toward any agreement made with that unit. That’s fine, I guess, but Hyatt is, as I already noted, aiming for an initial public offering soon, which means that the Louisville Hyatt Regency is the same in my mind as the Boston operation. Corporations want corporate personhood? Fine. That comes with collective responsibility. Second, the language of the existing position statement somewhat insists on a union situation, and the Boston workers were not unionized (to this, of course, I say so the fuck what?). These are all perfectly legitimate points, but I really don’t see why something like this requires a top-down or organization-based response. All it requires is the members of the organization making a simple choice. Whether Marriott benefits and Marriott is also despicable strikes me as utterly irrelevant. Of course you can’t choose out of dealing with despicable companies (problem of immanence), but that doesn’t mean you don’t put pressure on one when they seem weak. Capital wants us flexible and contradictory. Fine. Use it against them: the only consistency need be struggle. (Although I tend to be somewhat consistent on this point. The whole Graffiti Fridays operation boils down to that as well: capital wants to tie us to a signature that marks debt. Fine. Put the signature fucking everywhere. Autoimmunity, contra maybe Esposito, is not merely a condition of postmodernity. It’s a tactic.)
I totally agree with you, all the way, with everything you said about the timing, the target, and the tactics, so please don’t misunderstand me about that.
As Negri and Hardt quote Ani DiFranco as saying, “anything can be a weapon if you hold it right.” I’m just trying to figure out how hold it right so it actually shoots. As you said, it requires the members of the organization to make a choice, but there’s a procedure to making that choice if an official boycott is what you want (which would have the most force, tactically). That’s been the most frustrating and difficult thing in my experience. I remember the MLA Exec. always pretended to be worried about its non-profit status, which is bullshit, but that’s what they said. A lot of non-profits and local governments gave into to legal pressure when they tried to boycott specific corporations as Naomi Klein discusses in one of the last chapters of No Logo. And if you don’t want a formal boycott but just a significant number of individuals not choosing to stay at the Hyatt, then how to organize that? Is there a CCC FaceBook group, so you can do what the Penn State undergrads did to Penn State about football tickets? The Penn State kids got the administration to fold in less than two days. Ironically, I was teaching No Logo at Penn State when that happened, but despite the obvious power of collective action demonstrated for my students right before their eyes, they still doubted Klein’s thesis about anti-corporate tactics.