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In "The Threepenny Opera," Bertolt Brecht gave an oppressed hotel maid an exquisite dream of revenge. Pirate Jenny summons "a ship with eight black sails and 50 cannons" to render justice on her exploiters ("and when their heads roll, I'll say, `Hoop-la|' ").
In Los Angeles, as hotel corporations know too well, that militant ship of justice with the black sails is Local 11 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union.
This week, Local 11 will launch one of the most dramatic organizing campaigns in recent history. The result of several years of intensive planning and rank-and-file debate, it is an experiment in 21st-Century labor protest. Traditional union tactics have been completely rethought. There will be no formal strike nor stationary picket line.
Instead, under the leadership of their young president, Maria Elena Durazo, the hotel workers will become a peaceful guerrilla army. They intend to confront the tourist industry with disciplined but unexpected actions. Across the city, there will be leafletting, human billboards, flying pickets, delegations to city officials and, inevitably, mass civil disobedience.
Indeed, the hotel workers speak of building not just a union but a social movement, like those of the 1930s and 1960s. If their immediate targets are a dozen or so non-union luxury hotels in Downtown and at LAX, their strategic goal is a living wage for all 50,000 hotel employees in Los Angeles County. (The union currently represents 13,000.) Unionization of the hotels, in turn, is visualized as the first step in lifting hundreds of thousands of other service workers out of their low-wage ghetto.
The national business press has recently hailed entertainment and tourism as the...