Travel in city Greenwich, state Connecticut

Another wave of hotel strikes unfurled in two major New England cities Tuesday, while one in Southern California continues to grip a Hilton-affiliated property.

Over the busy Labor Day weekend, at least 10,000 unionized front-desk workers, housekeepers and other employees at dozens ofhotel properties across the country walked off the job after failing to come to an agreement in contract negotiations.

Few industries were disrupted as drastically by the Covid pandemic as the hospitality sector. Now, as travel has bounced back to prepandemic highs and Covid precautions have fallen by the wayside, thousands of hotel workers say they are still suffering from the lower wages and higher workloads that the pandemic period ushered in.

Some unionized hotel workers will participate in May Day rallies across the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, pushing for more employee fairness and wage increases, especially as the hotel industry bounces back from the pandemic. 

In a lounge at Connecticut’s Delamar Greenwich Harbor Hotel hangs a copy of a portrait of a man named Charles Mallory, who was traveling through Mystic, Connecticut on Christmas Eve of 1816. He was heading to the Midwest to seek his fortune, but got stuck in a snowstorm. So instead of continuing on, the entrepreneurial young chap got a job as an apprentice sailmaker in Mystic.