When 500 union hotel workers rallied June 9 outside the Hyatt Regency Waikiki, it made for great visuals.

Wearing red T-shirts and carrying signs with slogans like “Hawaii’s Needs, Not Wall Street Greed,” the workers — many of them Filipino-American women — marched back and forth along the sidewalk that parallels bustling Kalakaua Avenue.

The march was so thick that tourists struggled to weave through the crowd into the Regency and ritzy stores. A Regency manager complained to a Honolulu Police Department officer, “They are not living up to the agreement and not living up to the law.”

The manager was referring to protest rules. All in all, however, it was a peaceful rally and a publicity coup for UNITE HERE! Local 5, the union that represents 10,500 hospitality, food services and health-care workers in Hawaii.

That rally was an initial skirmish in a labor dispute that has the potential to become a hot issue in an election year.

Now things are about to heat up. The contracts for thousands of workers expire today. Negotiations are scheduled to begin July 7.

Hotel and resort workers make up a big chunk of local voters, about 40,000 people. Their votes matter. But the union is negotiating with a hotel industry that lost $1.14 billion from April 2008 when the downturn in tourism began through 2009.

The dispute could thrust the balance between labor and business into the campaign. The union has already endorsed former Congressman Neil Abercrombie for governor, and its leader, Eric Gill, is on the stump making passionate speeches on the greed of hotel owners and the need to support the workers.

June 9, the day of the protest, also marked the first annual shareholders’ meeting of Hyatt since it went public in November 2009.

“Wall Street is not hurting in this economy,” said Gill, Local 5’s financial secretary-treasurer and de facto boss. “They’ve done well for themselves while the rest of us suffer economic hardship.”

In a Honolulu Star-Advertiser article the same day, Keith Vieira, a senior executive with Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which has a large presence in the islands, disagreed.

“We hope for understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace,” the paper quoted Vieira. “We’ve laid of absolutely minimal union employees and laid off 18 percent of our managers. People don’t recognize the fact that hotels are having a very difficult time surviving.”While Hawaii’s vital tourism economy appears on the mend after two years of recession, the poor economy took its toll on hotel revenue.

Honolulu-based consulting firm Hospitality Advisors reported that hotel occupancy levels of 66.5 percent in 2009 were the lowest since 1987, when the company first began tracking the data.

Local 5’s Gill isn’t buying that the hotels are suffering, and recent reports show that occupancy, at least, is on the upswing

“Nationwide, the hotel industry is rebounding faster and stronger than expected,” Gill said in a press release, pointing to Hyatt’s shares up more than 65 percent since the chain made its initial public offering.

More Protests Outside Top Hotels?

If negotiations go as they did in 2006, when workers’ previous four-year contracts expired, it will be a contentious process.

Last time, once the dust had settled, Local 5 ended up securing wage increases of up to $2.40 an hour for non-tipped employees. Family medical benefits were extended, and house-keeping workloads were eased.

It helped that the local tourism industry was peaking in the middle of the last decade. To earn their gains, Local 5 workers staged large rallies in front of major properties such as the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki.

Like four years ago, this year contracts are also up at the Hilton, the Hyatt, the Waikiki Beach Marriott, the Moana Surfrider, and Sheraton properties in Waikiki, Kauai and Maui. Those contracts expire today, while about a half dozen more expire later this year.

In addition to maid service, the contracts pertain to food and beverage operations, the valet and front desk, and maintenance and engineering. They total about 6,500 positions.

“We Want To Be Treated Fairly”

Specifics of what exactly the union wants, and what exactly management will allow, are at this point vague. Thus far there’s mostly talk of maintaining medical benefits and workload requirements.

Formal negotiations between Local 5 and the Hilton begin July 7, with talks with Starwood to follow around mid-July.

Publicly, workers like Mike McGurn, 58, an engineer at the Hilton for 20 years, complain that the cost of living has only gone up since the time of the last contract.

“A living wage is hard to get,” McGurn told Civil Beat. “We want to be treated fairly.”

“I want good benefits for my family,” said Violeta Cabuya-Dao, 54, who has worked for 13 years at the Hyatt as a housekeeper and earns about $16 an hour. “I want to keep working for Hyatt.”

Enter The Politicians

Joining Local 5 at the Hyatt in early June was Abercrombie, now the union’s candidate.

Abercrombie’s chief opponent, Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann, meanwhile, picked up the endorsement of the Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association June 16. The association represents 170 hotels, condos and timeshares entities across the state and is an influential presence at the state Capitol.

In March, Hannemann also received the endorsement of the International Long Shore and Warehouse Union Local 142, which has 21,000 members. Over half are tourism industry workers, primarily on the neighbor islands.

The Summer’s Labor Story

With contracts already settled with other major Hawaii unions, including the four public sector unions, and with most ILWU hotel contracts recently extended, the Local 5 talks is the biggest labor story this summer.

The fact that it is an election year will only add to the interest in the talks.

“I think our June turnout sort of made the broader community realize how frustrating it is for us that our hotel owners are still using the economy as an excuse to cut back,” said Cade Watanabe, Local’s 5’s community and political director. “As we get back on track with the economy rebounding, the last thing our workers can afford is to be locked into some sort of permanent concessions. The hotels continue to make good money.”