Jewish Daily Forward: Long Strike at Chicago Hotel Pits Jew Against Jew

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.forward.com/articles/107115/



By Nathaniel Popper
Published June 03, 2009, issue of June 12, 2009.

Chicago — Nearly six years after the housekeepers and dishwashers at the Congress Plaza Hotel first went on strike, the enormous hotel here on Chicago’s lakefront shows the marks of being a battle zone in America’s labor wars.

Outside, the workers who went on strike in 2003 have kept up a nearly constant picket line in front of the hotel, yelling at guests who choose to enter. Inside, the lobby of this historic hotel — with its terra-cotta mosaic ceiling — was eerily empty on a few recent days at check-in time, and the restaurant on the lakefront was closed. Upstairs, in room 408, the grand, high ceilings remain, but the molding around the floor and ceiling was chipped, the towels and pillows were visibly worn, and the amenities were limited to a few Styrofoam cups next to a bag of generic coffee.

The Congress has been caught in a costly and seemingly intractable labor battle that has drawn in the city’s labor leaders, its mayor and, before he assumed the presidency, Barack Obama, who has marched twice with the striking workers.

This fight, though, has taken on its fiercest and most unusual form within the city’s Jewish community. The hotel is controlled by Albert Nasser, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist with residences in Geneva and New York. To run the day-to-day operations at the Congress, Nasser brought in Shlomo Nahmias, an Israeli-born businessman who has put up mezuzas on the hotel’s doors and won public support from his Orthodox rabbi for the hotel’s battle with its striking workers.

“You do not find in Chicago one hotel that has mezuzas on every door,” Nahmias told the Forward proudly in a short interview in his office, just upstairs from the lobby.

Nahmias’s foe — the local branch of the hotel union Unite Here — is itself led by a longtime Jewish labor leader who put a young Jewish organizer in charge of the strike when it first began. Since then, the workers — most of them immigrants from Latin America — have received growing support from Jewish communal organizations and rabbis around the city, who have criticized the conduct of the hotel’s management. Just this spring, a high school student who had learned about the strike through his synagogue convinced his school to move the senior prom from the controversial hotel. The strike has become the clearest available case study in the conflicting ways in which Jews approach labor issues today. It is enough to leave some of the workers in the middle of it thoroughly confused.

FULL story at link.

[elleng]

1. We've been known to disagree with one another occasionally!!!!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: