In a Year of Record Hospitality Strikes, Women Workers Have Taken the Lead

20.12.2023 - 22:28 / cntraveler.com

A historic year of strikes has been roiling across hotels in one of the biggest travel markets in the US. Starting in July, thousands of Los Angeles-based hotel employees, including cooks, housekeepers, dishwashers, servers, bellhops, and front desk agents, walked off the job to protest their current working conditions, according to Unite Here Local 11, the union that represents most hospitality workers in Los Angeles.

A major focus of the strikes is rolling back pandemic-era policies that cut the number of employees and increased workloads across departments. “I think all of the labor disruption that we’re seeing across our country is born at least in part from the pandemic,” says Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11. “I’ll speak from our industry: The employers can’t resist the temptation to exploit crises like this one. What they ended up doing was essentially having fewer workers doing more work in the hotels.”

At least 46 hotels and counting across LA and Orange counties have gone on strike more than 100 times since the summer, making it the largest hotel worker strike in US history, according to Unite Here.

Among those who are leading the charge? Women hospitality workers. This subset of the labor market faced unprecedented economic hardship during the pandemic, including lower pay, lost medical benefits, and delayed retirement that would possibly take decades to recover from—if they could fully recover at all.

Now women workers are taking control, participating in the workforce in record numbers and leading union organizing. “What we’ve seen is that women, in particular in this prime age group who are 25-54 years old, have really led the labor market recovery following COVID-19,” says Sara Estep, associate director of the Women's Initiative at the Center for American Progress. ("Prime age" is a term economists use to refer to people in the years when they typically produce the most economic output.) “I think it’s interesting to see all of these union wins leading to higher wages in these sectors that are women dominated. More than 50 percent of the leisure and hospitality labor force is [women], and so a lot of these wins are obviously going to benefit women workers.”

The trend rippling through the hospitality industry mirrors that of the larger economy. This year, women across sectors bounced back from the pandemic's so-called “she-cession,” in which women dropped from the workforce en masse due to COVID-19 childcare challenges and the tenuousness of female-dominated industries. “After controlling for demographic changes, we find that those who have contributed most to the rebound in overall labor force participation in April and May of 2023, three years after the nadir of