The Hotel Trades Council wants it both ways: It’s seeking to force all city hotels to use union-only labor, with no outside contracting allowed — even as the union itself spends millions on farmed-out services per year, including to non-union firms.
The HTC spent more than $700,000 in contracts for maintenance and cleaning services over the past 10 years, plus millions more on legal, consultant and computer services.
Meanwhile, City Councilwoman Julie Menin and the HTC push the unionization bill as aiming chiefly to curb sex trafficking and other criminal behavior, hence the deceptive name, the “Safe Hotel Act.”
Bizarrely, Menin cites rising hotel-related 311 calls (not 911) as indicating a growing safety problem.
Yet the American Hotel and Lodging Association points out, most hotel- or motel-related 311 complaints are “related to illegal parking, noise, dumping, elevator outages, blocked driveways and issues associated with people experiencing homelessness.”
Forcing the city’s 400 non-union hotels to hand over management of their workforces to the HTC would do nothing to solve these problems.
But it would force some owners to close up shop, and ensure costlier NYC hotel rooms, already among the nation’s most expensive (second only to Boston).
And so further kneecap a tourism industry that’s already taken a beating from the city’s real crime crisis and COVID lockdowns.
The bill is another bullet the city’s economy and a naked gift to a special interest, putting every hotel in town under one union’s thumb.
A union that doesn’t even live by the rule it’s out to impose on the industry.
