HONOLULU — More than 1,800 hotel workers went on an open-ended strike Tuesday at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort, and their union, UNITE HERE Local 5, says they will not return to work until they have a new contract.
Local housekeepers, front-desk agents, restaurant staff, maintenance workers and other Hilton Hawaiian Village workers are joining some 4,000 hotel workers across the U.S. who are now on open-ended strikes at Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott hotels in San Diego and San Francisco.
But the big question locally is, Are Local 5 workers going to strike like it’s 2018? That was the year that some 2,700 Local 5 workers at five Marriott-managed hotels went on a 51-day strike that ended with the ratification of a contract that gave union members up to $6.13 an hour in pay and benefit increases over four years.
Local 5’s request this time around is for more than $12 an hour in pay and benefit increases over four years. Heading into this strike, hotel management and owners reportedly had met the union about halfway — so those bargaining still have much ground to cover.
This strike also could incorporate elements of Local 5’s last hotel strike, which began the Sunday before the busy Labor Day holiday and ended Sept. 4. That action was limited to just three days, but it was Local 5’s largest strike since 1990, when union workers from 11 hotels went on a 22-day strike.
Some 10,000 UNITE HERE workers across the U.S. participated in the Sept. 2-4 strike, including 5,000 Hawaii hotel workers from the Sheraton Kauai Resort and seven Waikiki hotels: the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort; Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort &Spa; Moana Surfrider — a Westin Resort Spa; The Royal Hawaiian, a Luxury Collection Resort; Sheraton Princess Kaiulani; Sheraton Waikiki; and Waikiki Beach Marriott Resort &Spa.
Cade Watanabe, Local 5 financial secretary-treasurer, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the strike at the Hilton Hawaiian Village will continue until “we get a deal. This could be long.”
“We are still very far apart on the important issues related to making sure that we can afford to live in the cities that we welcome our guests to and in making sure that we have the commitment that we need from our hotel bosses that they value the work that we provide,” he said. “That’s why the workload and staffing issues are such a cornerstone of why we are out here today and why we are prepared to be out as long as it takes.”
Watanabe said, “We’ve shown flexibility at the table even as it relates to housekeeping working, which is a core issue of many of our campaigns. We’ve made a couple of moves, even on economics.”
Hilton did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Local 5 kicked off bargaining with Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott and Kyo-ya during a joint session April 24, but said months of negotiations have not addressed their biggest concerns: “wages that keep up with inflation and cost of living, proper staffing and fair workloads, and the reversal of COVID-era cuts in guest services and amenities.”
For now Local 5 is concentrating on settling the Hilton Hawaiian Village contract first, much like it did following the 2018 strike, when the Kyo-ya Marriott contract set the Waikiki standard.
The current hourly wages for Local 5 workers range from about $17 an hour for tipped wait staff to about $38 an hour for engineers, and housekeepers get about $28 an hour and might make another $6,000 to $7,000 in gratuities, according to Hawai‘i Hotel Alliance estimates.
Aileen Bautista, who has worked at the Hilton Hawaiian Village as a housekeeper for seven years, said she works two other jobs, including one that includes a weekly commute to Maui. The single mother said wages from her Hilton Hawaiian Village job are not enough, and she struggles to support her twin children and to send money to her family in the Philippines.
“I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck since the (three-day) strike,” Bautista said. “So now I’m behind on my rent for sure. But this strike is a very necessary sacrifice. We need to be united. That way we can have what we need here, what we are fighting for: one contract.”
Watanabe said Local 5 workers are highly committed to the bargaining process and that 400 or 500 workers attended a Sept. 12 bargaining session at the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
Watanabe said the union bargained with Kyo-ya and Marriott on Sept. 17 and with Hyatt on Sept. 19. He said new bargaining dates have not been set and that if issues remain unresolved, additional strikes are possible at any of the other seven Hawaii hotels that have authorized strikes.
For instance, Watanabe said UNITE HERE workers at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, who participated in the Labor Day actions, never went back to work and are entering the fourth week of striking.
The element of surprise — not knowing when or for how long workers will strike — makes it harder for hotels to overcome the logistical challenges of a strike. This is especially true when owners or managers are grappling with UNITE HERE strikes in multiple venues.
Syrapee Sartrapai, who has worked as a bell captain at the Hilton Hawaiian Village for almost 33 years, said, “We need everyone to understand that we need everyone’s support. It isn’t just about us here; it’s for our community. We can’t all move to the mainland,” Sartrapai said. “We can’t keep running away from the problem. We need to solve the problem here. It’s not just about getting better wages; it’s about respect.”
Sartrapai said the Local 5 workforce at the Hilton Hawaiian Village is stretched too thin, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, and she and other workers have had to make excuses for Hilton when the guests complain.
“From Day One, I know that the job is customer service,” she said. “The guests are my priority, and if I can’t help them, I feel like I have let them down.”
Pleasant Holidays President and CEO Jack Richards said Hilton Hawaiian Village is among the Hawaii hotels most often booked by clients, and some 200 were due to check in in the immediate aftermath of the strike.
“We know that they closed (Tuesday’s) luau, but there hasn’t been a lot of communication about the impact of the strike,” Richards said. “I expect we’ll hear more soon.”
Richards said some guests were asking to change to a hotel where workers were not striking.
“As long as the strike is contained to the Hilton Hawaiian Village, I think people will still travel to Hawaii,” he said. “But if they strike at other hotels, now you start impacting tourism to Hawaii because people will go to other destinations. They aren’t going to go to Hawaii if every hotel is on strike. “
Richards said prior to this latest hotel strike, travel to Hawaii was showing some year-over-year improvement. But he said that was mostly because fall of 2023 was negatively affected by the devastating Aug. 8, 2023, Maui wildfires.
“The coming festive season has filled in a bit and is better than 2023,” he said. “But advanced bookings are still in the negative all the way into May of 2025.”
Keith Vieira, principal of KV &Associates, Hospitality Consulting, said the timing of Local 5’s latest strike could not be worse for Hawaii’s visitor industry, whose members just spent millions on a marketing saturation campaign in Los Angeles. Gov. Josh Green and Maui Mayor Richard Bissen even joined the Los Angeles campaign to extend invitations to visit Hawaii, especially Maui.
“At a time that it’s key that our narrative is that ‘you are welcome in Hawaii and come and celebrate,’ that’s the absolute worst time to have (a strike),” Vieira said. “The difficult part is that it certainly affects way more than just the employees and the hotels. This affects the community and the mom-and-pop shops that are struggling to make it with business down significantly, especially without the Asian market.”
Jerry Gibson, president of the Hawai‘i Hotel Alliance, said he is in Japan this week along with other members of Hawaii’s visitor industry, who are working hard to shore up travel to Hawaii.
“The efforts to market Hawaii haven’t stopped with the Los Angeles initiative,” Gibson said. “We want to keep moving forward to try to get a good base (of business) for next year. We’re way down in sales for the balance of the year, which looks bleak. Certainly, this is a difficult situation with a strike. That’s why we need to come to a good resolution together.”
