Worker Organizations

South African Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union

IWW Ísland

Unite Here

Stories and Lessons

How Spray Tan Technicians and Sugaring Aestheticians Built their Groundbreaking Salon Chain Union (2025)

Rolling the Union On (cruise ship, 2022)

Successful Organizing Among Seasonal Workers! (2022)

Casino Workers on Strike in Cambodia Face Down Repression (2022)

Workers at Big South Florida Hotel Boost Minimum Pay to $20, Retain Union Jobs (2022)

At World’s Largest Hilton, Workers Fight for Jobs, Daily Cleaning (2021)

The Long History of Hospitality Unions in the United States

Room Maids Strike Back at a Paris Hotel (2020)

They Think We Are Easy to Control: Inside the Eva Air Flight Attendant Strike (Taiwan, 2019)

Marriott Hotel Strikers Set a New Industry Standard (2018)

Workers Run this Hotel (Argentina, 2017)

“What do you do for a living?” (United States, 2011)

Hotel Housekeepers Break Silence on Job Assaults (United States, 2011)

Fighting Back in the High-End Hotels: An interview with a Miami Wobbly

Day of Solidarity: Portland, Seattle & San Francisco (2011)

The IWW Campaign at Star Tickets, part 1

The IWW Campaign at Start Tickets, part 2

You Can’t Litigate Your Way to a Union: The IWW Campaign at Boulevard Bingo (United States, 1992)

2010: Pearl Continental Workers Sit In Strike (Pakistan)

Hotel Workers Wildcat in Southern California (2008)

Iraqi Hotel Workers Win Unpaid Wages (2007)

After Two Years on the Line, San Francisco Hotel Workers Win Big Gains (2006)

Books on Hospitality & Tourism Worker Struggle

We Always Had a Union (2025)

One of New York City’s most powerful unions, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO, represents almost 40,000 workers. Shaun Richman’s history places the labor organization within the context of American industrial and craft unionism and reveals how it came to influence politics and economic development in the city and beyond.

From the start, New York’s organized hotel workers experimented with and adapted how they organized and governed members and related to other labor unions. Richman follows union fortunes from early IWW activity through the Communist-led affiliates of the American Federation of Labor in the 1920s and 1930s, the shaping of breakthrough negotiating strategies, and the postwar era. As Richman shows, workers adopted a radicalism and militancy seldom associated with an AFL organization while openly negotiating the Communist Party’s power and influence within the union until the Party’s eclipse in the 1950s.

An inspiring story of action and perseverance, We Always Had a Union profiles a foundational American labor union and offers lessons for today’s workers and organizers.