500,000 soccer fans from across the world are expected to travel to Philadelphia for the World Cup.
With less than one week until the first FIFA World Cup match in Philadelphia kicks off, hundreds of workers at six hotels across the city are ready to go on strike if contracts are not reached by the start of the tournament.
“Workers at the [Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown] hotel have been without a contract for over a year, and they’ve been in bargaining for over a year,” Rosslyn Wuchinich, President of UNITE HERE Local 274, said in an interview.
UNITE HERE Local 274 represents nearly 4,000 hotel, food service, and stadium workers throughout the Philadelphia region.
“They went on strike last October for four days, and other hotels in the city have set a standard now of getting hotel housekeepers up to a minimum of $30 an hour, as well as massive improvements in healthcare, especially for people’s families and children, and their retirement,” she added.
Philadelphia will host six World Cup matches from June 14 through July 4, with more than 500,000 soccer fans expected to travel to the region for those matches.
Besides the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown, workers at the Four Points by Sheraton in Northeast Philadelphia, the Hilton Garden Inn in Center City, the Hilton at Penn’s Landing, the Warwick Hotel in Rittenhouse Square, and the Wyndham Hotel in the Historic District are all threatening to go on strike.
If workers are to walk off the job in the next week, Wuchinich predicts that World Cup guests will be in for a chaotic experience.
“ It would be chaos. These hotels are going to be completely full. I don’t know how they’re going to clean rooms. I don’t know how they’re going to clean bathrooms,” Wuchinich said. “ The last time we were on strike, they couldn’t even keep the bathrooms stocked with toilet paper. So I think it’s going to be pretty ugly inside if we have to go out on strike.”
Last Friday, a couple dozen attendees from Netroots Nation, a yearly progressive conference, joined workers from the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown hotel for a picket and an impromptu soccer game inside the hotel’s lobby warning management about the potential strike.
Kathleen Householder, a 32-year employee at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown hotel, explained how employees at the hotel have had their workloads increase over the years as the hotel’s management cut its staff from 350 full-time employees to under 150 full-time employees.
“ Our company does not want to settle our contract. We’ve been fighting for a contract for two years now,” Householder said in an interview. “We need increases in our staff. Over the years they have just been decreasing our staff, so we want better medical. We do more jobs in here than we’ve ever done.”
The Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown has over 700 rooms, and is the largest unionized hotel in Philadelphia. It has previously been viewed as the hotel that sets the industry standard for other hotel workers throughout the city. Union leaders say their strike pushed other hotels to settle outstanding contracts.
“ They understand that they want to provide that service to the guests and all the people coming in,” Wuchinich said.
She added, “They don’t want interruptions in business, but the [Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown] has refused to do that. And so that is why we’re out here today and why we will be out here on strike during the World Cup and the 250th anniversary if we can’t get justice for the workers.”
