This year, contracts are up for negotiation for more than 40,000 hotel workers across the U.S. and Canada. For many, these are the first work contracts they’ll negotiate since the start of the pandemic — and conditions are vastly different now than they were in 2019.
While hotel companies have largely rebounded from the pandemic — and some markets have logged record ADRs throughout 2023 and 2024 — workers claim the benefits aren’t trickling down to their paychecks. Across the country, union members represented by the nation’s largest hospitality guild, Unite Here, say their wages aren’t sufficient to meet the rising cost of living. And many say that pandemic-era staffing cuts were never reversed, creating more strenuous workloads.
Hotels, on the other hand, claim that they’re paying more than ever in wages. Earlier this year, the American Hotel and Lodging Association projected that the industry would pay workers 4% more in 2024 for a record $123 billion in wages. Yet hotels are still struggling to fill roles.
Last year, Unite Here-affiliated workers logged gains in Las Vegas and Southern California, where walkouts (and threatened walkouts) netted hotel employees their highest-ever negotiated wages. The result of this year’s negotiations could impact the nature of hospitality jobs — and the companies that oversee them — for years to come.
Strike negotiations may be piecemeal. While it’s often a union’s chapter for an entire market — say, Boston or San Francisco — that votes on whether to authorize strikes, unions at individual properties can call for strikes any time after their contracts expire, meaning different hotels in the same market can walk out at different times.
Here, Hotel Dive tracks the must-know happenings in hospitality’s labor movement. This tracker begins coverage in the month of August, meaning strike activity that occurred earlier in the year in Las Vegas and Southern California is not included.
