I work as a personal concierge at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. The title that I hold—the first of its kind in the hotel industry and one that required special training—does not fully explain my job responsibilities.

Unlike a typical concierge, I perform a wide range of tasks, including check-ins and check-outs but not limited to accounting, making special reservations and suggesting points of interest, helping guests with luggage, assisting with package and food deliveries, setting up room decor to celebrate special occasions, answering phones, and fulfilling all kinds of guest requests. Despite the different duties and training of the job, I was still compensated as a regular front desk agent.

The pandemic burdened me with additional duties as the hotel was severely understaffed and extremely busy. The personal concierge team I joined in 2022 had once consisted of 29 members but due to steady turnover, by the time I got the job, there were only six, including me. My colleagues were disappointed and worn out. I knew something needed to change. But what? My personal answer to that question is a long one.

I was raised in Forest Hills, New York by ambitious parents from Mexico City who were studying to become physicians. I had to take on the responsibility of caring for my two younger siblings while my parents were busy with study, work, and dealing with our difficult financial situation. That struggle taught me invaluable lessons about the value of education, of striving for excellence, and of never accepting injustices. My parents taught me to speak up and advocate for the most vulnerable, who tend to be preyed on by the corrupt.

Inspired by my parents, I decided to seek our union’s help in making my job and the jobs of my colleagues more sustainable. I must confess that when I first discovered that the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills was a union property, I thought, wrongly, that the union, Unite Here Local 11, controlled workers and our jobs. But then I studied the union’s rules and our contract and met with union leaders, and soon realized that we workers were the union. We could engage with the union and one another to bring positive changes to our workplace.

Our union contract with the hotel expired on June 30, 2023. With negotiations failing and management handling meetings with bad faith, it was apparent that a strike was inevitable not just in our hotel but in hotels all over the city.

Unity was going to be key to our success. So while the hotel was providing conflicting misinformation and trying to convince us to resign our union memberships, I started a group chat for all Waldorf Astoria team members and union reps. The chat was crucial in allowing us to receive news and updates in real-time, and post images and videos. This information-sharing inspired much of our staff to become fired up and join the citywide union actions that became the largest hotel strike in modern U.S. history. From the beginning, we also had broad support among hotel workers and the public because our demands were based on “five pillars” of change that most people could agree on: a living wage increase, healthcare, humane staffing levels, pension increases, and union growth.

Going on my first strike was scary, empowering, sad, and beautiful. It was a shocking and jarring experience at first—we hadn’t planned to escalate things to this level, which meant risking retaliation. However, as time went on, I began to feel truly empowered and determined to win the fight for justice. The strike made me aware of the realities of my fellow Californians who work in hotels. Thousands of them suffer from homelessness, evictions, serious and expensive health issues, and other precarious financial circumstances.

Throughout the summer and into the fall, hundreds of hotel workers in Los Angeles went on strike in different locations at random times and for a random number of days. We went on strike twice at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, for a total of seven days. Our actions took place outside the hotel and in the lobby; it was impossible for guests to avoid us.

Workers striking at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills. Courtesy of author.

We garnered an incredible amount of support from the public, including hotel regulars, clergy members, UPS workers, culinary workers, and people driving by and honking for us. Support also came from political and civil rights leaders—among them Tom Morello, former West Hollywood Mayor Sepi Shyne, Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, U.S. Senator Laphonza Butler, State Senator Maria Elena Durazo (our former union leader), and most recently President Joe Biden in Nevada.

We also had to contend with extreme temperatures on the picket lines as well as verbal abuse from some angry patrons and local residents. Hotel managers installed hedges, fencing, and even cages to keep us further from the premises, and hired new security workers to intimidate us in the name of “safety.” Using an app called Instawork, they hired unqualified staff to replace us. At one point they deactivated our digital keyed access. We were lucky; other hotels were more punitive and resorted to violence.

Solidarity was clearly the path to victory. It was disappointing to see a few colleagues at hotels turn their backs on us, out of fear. It was also frustrating to ask for support from major public figures—like U.S. Representative Katie Porter, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Taylor Swift, who toured L.A. during the strike—and not get it.

But most importantly, the overwhelming majority of the union held, in no small part because of the women who represented a majority of the union in our ranks and our leadership. They never took “no” for an answer, and they lifted the rest of us up when we got tired or discouraged. And we kept achieving victories as hotels and the union began reaching agreements in the early fall.

Finally, in the early afternoon on Friday, December 8, I received a message from the director of Unite Here Local 11, Lorena Lopez, requesting a phone call with all the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills union leaders. We were about to begin our third strike at the Waldorf Astoria in advance of the Golden Globes Award nomination announcements at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on December 11. But when I got to the meeting, the feeling was of something bigger and more hopeful. I heard our director declare over speaker phone, “I have some important news to share with you. I want to let you know that I am so proud of you. You worked so hard, and your efforts paid off! Congratulations! The Waldorf has agreed to our five pillars. Congratulations, you won!”

We used our group chat to request every union member meet us at the famous Waldorf Ballroom. Once gathered, I was honored to deliver the good news to everyone as I held back tears of joy: “Thank you guys for being here. As you know, I’m Alaink, and we have been fighting to win a fair contract. We were already planning to go on strike Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. However, new developments have happened, and I am very happy to announce that we have WON!”

Suddenly, the entire ballroom was filled with cheers and applause and faces of relief, bringing many to tears. The strike is over at our hotel, but I feel profoundly changed and renewed. Striking was hard work. It brought unbearable stress and forced me to neglect the rest of my life—including my incredibly supportive husband. But the payoff was worth it.

We won a historic contract of a lifetime that will transform the entire hotel industry and uplift hard-working brown and Black men and women and other marginalized people who will finally get a chance to join the middle class. Housekeeping team members, cooks, and other non-tipped workers will receive wage hikes of $10 an hour over the term of the contract—a 40–50% increase in pay, half of which will come this year. Housekeeping workers at most hotels will earn $35 an hour by July 2027, and top cooks will earn $41 an hour. Tipped workers will see improvements like double-time pay for holidays, vacation, sick days, and increased shares of service charges. Automatic 20% gratuities at full-service restaurants will be 100% shared by staff. Our contract maintains health insurance in which workers pay no more than $20 per month for full family coverage.

We have bigger plans, too, including a new deal for the Olympics that includes family-sustaining jobs and affordable housing. I hope our success will embolden hotel workers around the country—and anyone who is facing injustices in the workplace. Remember to be courageous, to organize, to think big, and to lead with love, dignity, and conviction. The path to victory is only sure to those who do not give up, give in, or stay silent.

The post How We Won a Historic Contract for Hotel Workers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By “this stuff,” he meant mutual aid, in which members of a community work together to meet each other’s urgent needs. Normally, the day laborers and domestic workers who are members of his organization, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), work together on direct-action campaigns to fight exploitation and advocate for their rights. But the pandemic has pushed them into organizing mutual aid around food.

They are not alone. In recent months, members of progressive direct-action organizations have developed new systems for checking on their neighbors, dropping off food and medicine, providing protective personal equipment to incarcerated family members, and giving cash to those suddenly unemployed to meet immediate rent, food, and medical needs. At the same time, they’re continuing to press for workers’ rights and proper health care during the pandemic, as well as ensure access to federal stimulus money for individuals and small minority-owned businesses.

In so doing, these organizations are harkening back to their roots: people creating social ties by helping each other out, and those ties fueling collective fights for new systems and policies.

Combining mutual aid and direct action might seem like common sense, but in today’s corporatized and professionalized nonprofit world, this model had disappeared almost completely. Community-based nonprofits in the United States today are split into distinct silos, with service provision firmly compartmentalized in one box and direct-action organizing in another.

The roots of this split lie in the increasing professionalization of the sector over half a century, driven by no small amount of sexism, classism and racism.

Throughout American history, mutual aid societies existed wherever poor, disenfranchised people could be found, particularly Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Chinese immigrants of the 19th century formed networks to defend against xenophobic violence and to fund their businesses when banks refused. Native Americans formed urban community centers in the 1950s and 1960s after the government terminated the rights of more than 100 tribes, forcing people off traditional lands across the Great Plains as well as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Montana. These urban centers provided employment support, housing assistance, and health care, creating both the material and political conditions for self-determination.

During and immediately after slavery, free Black people formed mutual aid societies to provide resources denied them by the white community. The first was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in the 1770s to provide a place to worship and financial resources to members. Similar organizations soon sprung up in Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans and Newport, Rhode Island, providing non-denominational spiritual guidance and resources such as banks, schools, burial societies, newspapers, food, support for widows and orphans, and more. W.E.B. DuBois called these “the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life.”

These organizations were a threat to the racial status quo. Charleston shut down the Free Dark Men of Color in the 1820s for fear of slave insurrections and Maryland made it a felony to join a mutual aid society in 1842. Despite the crackdowns, thousands more societies formed after the Civil War, making enormous gains for Black communities. Decades later, these self-organized groups would become the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement and the inspiration for the Black Panthers, who famously served up free breakfasts and health programs alongside their fight against police brutality and exploitation of Black communities.

European immigrant communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, too, relied on cooperative efforts that helped their members learn English, find decent housing, and resist labor abuse. Incorporating a mix of mutual aid, community organizing, and legislative campaigning, the social reformer Jane Addams founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889, sparking a movement that counted more than 400 “settlement houses” within 20 years. Addams had been inspired by visiting an English settlement house where she saw boundaries of language, class status, and religious affiliation stretching and blurring. In the United States, settlement houses were community arts centers, social service providers, and civic action committees all rolled into one.

Formalizing social work for white people began with the settlement houses. In the late 1890s, Addams’ training of settlement house volunteers became the basis of early social work college programs. Settlement house workers increasingly felt the need for credentials because the medical doctors and lawyers who intervened in the lives of poor families routinely ignored the insights of the volunteers, mostly well-off white women, whom they perceived as amateurs. Early training programs were practical, such as the 1904 partnership between Columbia University and the New York School of Philanthropy. In 1915, medical educator Dr. Abraham Flexner critiqued social work as lacking professionalism of the sort that’s found in medicine, law, and preaching, and labeled social workers as “narrow minded technicians.” Colleges then began to push curricula that would elevate the “theory” of social work rather than the practice.

The settlement houses, meanwhile, continued their social reform projects, including sanitation reform, women’s suffrage, temperance, legislation against child labor, and labor law. Movement leaders such as labor advocate Frances Perkins wrote many of these ideas into the New Deal. In the throes of the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 created pensions for the elderly, care for the disabled, a state-run medical insurance program for the poor, and unemployment insurance. But the legislation also reflected the prevailing racism of the time, excluding domestic and farm workers in a compromise that ensured that Southern Democrats and the agricultural industry would continue to have access to cheap labor. Left to fend for themselves, those communities, largely comprised of people of color, continued to rely on mutual aid even as they tried to organize for change.

In this April 16, 1969 photograph, Bill Whitfield, member of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City, serves free breakfast to children before they go to school. Courtesy of William P. Straeter/Associated Press.

At the same time, Black social work traditions grew out of mutual aid organizations, added journalism to the practice, and for decades had a testy relationship with the white social work establishment. Leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Jane Patterson founded the Colored Women’s League in 1892 to generate racial uplift through self-help. Thyra J. Edwards, virtually unknown in mainstream social work history, was also a trained journalist. These women made lynching their top priority.

Despite political action among social workers of all races, Saul Alinsky is the white man credited with codifying the social action elements. Starting in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky eventually became the nation’s most famous “community organizer” with his approach of starting with local issues in order to rally people to fight for broader political change. He described this approach in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “They organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.” Alinsky built the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), one of the largest and most powerful organizing networks of the 20th century, uniting churches, ethnic associations, and neighborhood groups in direct-action campaigns. It was an IAF affiliate in Baltimore, for example, that won the first local Living Wage law in 1994, the precursor to today’s “Fight for $15.”

The Alinsky model came to dominate the way activists were trained and organized. It featured highly professionalized, well-paid organizers who kept any radical politics to themselves in the name of people power. The IAF also had a distinctly male culture. Alinsky expected organizers to work around the clock; women, he thought, were too delicate, even if he didn’t publicly discourage them from the work.

Alinsky’s influential “rules” saw services—mostly organized by and provided by women—only as a means to direct action campaigning. The goal was to deliver “winnable” material improvements as well as change the relations of power between everyday people and the institutions that shaped their lives. Described as “non-ideological,” this model characterized membership-based community organizations for many years. But over time, organizers who were women and people of color have disrupted and changed that norm, arguing that racism, sexism and capitalism would never be challenged under these conditions.

In any case, the split between providing services and advocating for systemic change had long been established in the U.S. When the National Association of Social Workers was formed in 1955, providing services via casework and organizing for systemic change had become distinct streams of social work. By 1960, they had their own tracks at various universities. Funding patterns followed. Philanthropists, too, viewed these functions as separate, driving far more resources to apoliticized service provision than they did to community organizing. When I was learning to organize in the late 1980s, I was consistently told that self-help schemes, lending circles, and cooperative businesses had little to do with “real” organizing.

Today, though, a new generation of activists is erasing that distinction.

The pandemic, in particular, has clarified that organizing cannot be divorced from actually helping people. In March, on a webinar about race and COVID-19, the moderator asked us panelists, “What inspires you?” I applauded all the self-organized mutual aid schemes and noted that prominent organizing networks have jumped in, including the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, Faith in Action, and Make the Road, among many others. All are responding to the immediate needs of their constituencies—food, masks, money, help navigating government assistance—and diverging from their pre-coronavirus activities. Another panelist countered: “But mutual aid can’t solve this crisis at scale. Only government can do that.” Some activists fear that politicians will try to replace government care with community care, or that mutual aid will absorb all of our energy, leaving nothing for political fights.

But especially in times when the state dramatically fails to deliver what people need, mutual aid is a powerful way, sometimes even the only way, to help people manage daily life while sustaining their spirits in the struggle for systemic change. Organizing requires courage; courage comes from community. Mutual aid fuels the audacity to demand more because it reinforces that we are not alone in our suffering.

Chai Moua, the Civic Engagement Director at Freedom, Inc, a 17-year-old coalition of Black and Southeast Asian groups in Wisconsin, told me that her organization has been ready for this moment. “We have always believed in combining service and organizing to get to a bigger future,” she said. “Our food pantry is actually part of our civic engagement work. We’re not just giving you food but showing systematically ‘this is why our folks don’t have access to healthy food,’ and then changing those systems.”

The United States, and perhaps the world, is at the beginning of a string of fundamental shifts in culture, politics, economy and daily life. The combined disruption of an ongoing deadly pandemic, record unemployment, and multiracial uprisings to defend Black lives will soon make many of our existing models irrelevant. Photos of sophisticated mutual aid operations at recent Black Lives Matter protests powerfully symbolize the future of organizing, protest, and direct action. Everyone is discovering what some of us have always understood: The social ties cultivated by mutual aid are the same ties needed to fuel a historic boycott, a union organizing drive, or a campaign to close down prisons. Our ancestors knew this well, and now we do too.

The post Why Today’s Social Revolutions Include Kale, Medical Care, and Help With Rent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I try to make it culturally relevant,” León said while answering a question from an audience member at a Zócalo/The California Wellness Foundation event, entitled “How Can We Make Farm Work Healthier?”

“I don’t talk about singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice,” added León, in reference to the amount of time you should wash your hands for. “I talk about singing the first verse of ‘De Colores.’ When we communicate with our folks, we want to do it in a language they understand.”

León was not speaking metaphorically. For many Huron families, Spanish is their second language. The people in his town speak, in total, some 12 languages, eight of which are Mesoamerican native languages. “I wish there was a better way to engage with all these farmers and rancheros and contractors,” said León. “I see the campesinos, the farmworkers, walking without masks. I think it would be good if they have masks.”

A panel on making farm work healthier in America is relevant at any time. The panel that León joined had, in fact, previously been scheduled to take place on an April evening in Fresno before the pandemic broke out, forcing the discussion to move online instead.

COVID-19 makes the discussion even more urgent. All four panelists said the current crisis adds a new health threat for farmworkers, while deepening existing health risks that range from unstable housing to economic insecurity to a propensity for diabetes and respiratory diseases. At the same time, the attention that the pandemic is bringing to the food supply chain may provide an opportunity to better address farmworkers’ needs.

“Farmworkers and small farmers are considered essential right now. But most people don’t really know what they do or even the risks they take to bring food to our tables,” said KVPR news director and event moderator Alice Daniel, as she started the discussion, which streamed live last night on Zócalo’s YouTube channel. “What’s at stake for everyone?”

Organic farmer and artist Nikiko Masumoto brought a historical perspective. As a fourth-generation farmer, she noted that the U.S. food system depends on immigrant laborers who lack political power and equal rights.

Take the federal stimulus package to help Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the COVID crisis, Masumoto said. “It’s not a secret, a large percentage of our farmworker base are undocumented immigrants who, because of the way the law was structured, are now not going to get the $1,200 stimulus check that every other American is getting,” she said. “That’s an example of how we make laws that continue to marginalize farmworkers.”

Masumoto recalled the ways that American xenophobia has long been tied up with land and agriculture, but she also expressed hope that the current moment might produce a better world for people who work in the fields. “We can’t live without food and thus, if we don’t address the people who produce our food, we can’t move forward,” she said.

Another panelist, medical sociologist Tania Pacheco-Werner, who is co-assistant director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute, called attention to how government policies can keep farmworkers safe right now. In the focus groups Pacheco-Werner conducts, farmworkers “say over and over again, let’s follow the laws that are already in the books,” she said. Specifically, farmworkers complain of farmers and contractors violating existing safety laws, and that the state occupational safety and health agency is too “bare bones” to implement and enforce laws.

At the same time, Pacheco-Werner said, too many laws on economic relief, health, and labor exempt farmworkers from their protections. “Often, they are seen as their own category,” she said. “And when we look at them as a different category, what they really become is secondary citizens within our labor force. That further perpetuates the health disparities they’re already going to go through because of their income, because of their immigration status, because of their language capabilities.”

Going forward, farmworkers need to be integrated into labor, health, and other policies. “We really need to see how they are essential to our food chain,” she said. “Food is tied to security. They’re tied to our national security, and they should be seen in that manner.”

Another panelist, health researcher Chia Thao, shared her own story of growing up in a farming family. Now as a health expert whose work focuses on pesticide use and the well-being of small-scale farmers in the Central Valley, she says she’s seen first-hand how there are large data gaps when it comes to farmworkers and their needs.

“I found that there’s a lack of voice in the community because there’s no research looking into the community,” said Thao, who is currently a doctoral candidate in public health at the University of California, Merced. “So we don’t know their needs. We don’t know some of the challenges and struggles that they have.” When farmworkers’ needs are met, the change can be powerful; for instance, Pacheco-Werner pointed out how, under the Affordable Care Act, there are now more community clinics in less populated places, including down the street from where she lives in the Fresno County city of Sanger.

During the discussion and in a question-and-answer session with a robust online audience, panelists offered specific ideas for improving the health and lives of farmworkers.

León championed the concept of a 401F (“F for farmworker”) retirement plan that would supplement other income (including Social Security, and be part of a suite of supports that include health insurance, sick leave, and citizenship for those who want it). If farmworkers could comfortably retire, instead of working into their 70s, they’d have time to serve as community resources to local farmers’ markets or community gardens, the mayor suggested. “We need our elders to come back home,” he said.

Pacheco-Werner also emphasized the importance of building more supportive structures for farmworkers, especially for those who are undocumented. Making them eligible for public relief and for protections from evictions or foreclosure would not only allow farmworkers to shelter in place in the current crisis, but would also help stabilize the neighborhoods where they live when this is over. “We have to think about farmworkers as part of communities,” she said.

Masumoto echoed that point. “When we ask questions about the well-being of farmworkers,” she said, “We see a mirror of ourselves as a collective and our failings to address all of these intersecting issues—health and well-being, transportation, access via language, the ability to have some of the most fundamental parts of life: shelter, security, that your voice matters.”

The post Will COVID-19 Finally Convince Us to Do Better by Farmworkers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.