In her 17 years as a guest room attendant, Isabel Gonzalez has scarcely had a moment’s rest. Gonzalez is responsible for cleaning 15 hotel rooms per day—stripping dirty linens, taking out the trash, making beds, cleaning toilets, sweeping, mopping, and dusting—all in the span of 30 to 45 minutes per room. Sometimes she can fill a garbage bag from one room alone, with liquor and juice bottles, bottle caps, and half-eaten food from the floor. When pets stay in the rooms, she must find the time to vacuum twice and carefully sponge fur from the suede chairs.

"No one expects billionaire investors to be on the right side of a labor dispute. A union, though, is different. Among the small number of other investors who own Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is the Laborers Union Pension Fund of Eastern and Central Canada.

After other efforts to contact the pension fund failed, Holmes and her colleagues went to the fund’s office in Toronto in hopes of talking worker to worker. “We went to the Laborers Union and were stopped by security,” she says. They were told that no one was available, but that security would take down their information. “We were there about four days and we never heard back from them."

  • eldavi@lemmy.ml
    ·
    22 hours ago

    it's an open secret that the culinary union is little more than controlled opposition for las vegas's investors and owners and it has a track record of bowing to management's will in several pro-union struggles in the past; the culinary union is a union in name only.