Portside

After two months of strikes, workers at the largest hotel company in the world have won their biggest demands and set a new pattern for the hospitality industry.

“There is no end date. It’s an indefinite strike until we achieve our demands,” says Anand Singh, president of the union's Local 2 in San Francisco.

The United Auto Workers won a union contract covering nearly 150 cafeteria workers at four Airbnb facilities. It’s the latest development in a unionization trend among tech companies’ sub-contracted staff. Share Better, a group backed by Unite Here, the hotel industry, housing groups and elected officials, said Thursday that the new Airbnb effort doesn’t go far enough.

The move by Unifor comes a day after Canada's largest private sector union split from the CLC.

Earlier this year, hundreds of workers at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, the city's largest hotel, voted to unionize, a rare development locally that labor leaders think could give them a long-sought foothold in the city's mostly low-wage but critical hospitality industry, which employs nearly 80,000 workers.

Hospitality union UNITE HERE represents more than 3,000 restaurant and hotel employees in the greater Houston area, and around 250 of its members have experienced “catastrophic losses,” according to Texas organizing director Danna Schneider. UNITE HERE arrived soon after Harvey made landfall, and the organization has since been delivering groceries and checking up on its members.

The settlement may well resonate beyond the gates of Harvard Yard. It marks the fourth time in recent months that a union has bucked a long and steady decline in the clout of organized labor groups. The show of strength for organized labor comes at a time when just 11.1 percent of the US workforce is unionized. Some labor specialists say changing economic conditions are giving unions newfound leverage, despite their relatively modest ranks.

Secretar Clinton in addressing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Las Vegas called the first day of the Republican Convention "Surreal". AFSCME represents 1.6 million public sector workers. She attacked the anti-worker policies of the Republican Governors of Wisconsin and Illinois, Scott Walker and Bruce Rauner. She said Trump had no solutions to help working families. Later in the day she picked up the support of UNITE HERE.

Under an obscure provision of the city's wage hike, unionized hotels were granted an exemption allowing them to pay their employees less. The result is that some members in the hotel workers union Unite Here, now make less than those doing the same job in non-union workplaces.

Democratic politicians picked up on the union’s organizing campaign. Presidential candidate and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley spoke in favor of the Culinary two days before a rally in August. And Hillary Clinton relayed support at a union rally in October, a day before the first Democratic debate at the Wynn Las Vegas.