Hotel workers met regularly to discuss their health, the safety situation and to strategize about how to address their complaints with the company, Holliday's Helping Hands, which had been contracted by Los Angeles County to run the facility.ĭuring a Zoom call set up by union representatives and employees who had organized a worker organizing committee, 'We noticed that managers of the company had busted into the meeting-they had crashed our Zoom call,' recalls Lorena Lopez, a director of organizing with UNITE HERE Local 11. That prompted the union that represents hotel workers in Southern California to file a complaint with the state and the National Labor Relations Board alleging that the hotel failed to follow pandemic safety protocols. Last January, at the height of the pandemic, an elderly housekeeper at a former hotel in Long Beach, California, that was being used to quarantine people with COVID-19, tested positive for the virus and died.

This story is co-published with Capital & Main

Casino surveillance workers union