Fact Sheet for Speakers and Attendees at the Contraceptive Technologies Conference

Hyatt Regency San Francisco, March 7-10  2012

Unite Here Local 2 represents hotel workers in San Francisco and San Mateo counties.  We greatly respect the work of Contraceptive Technologies and its efforts in promoting women’s health.

The Hyatt Regency Embarcadero in San Francisco is currently under a worker-called boycott as a result of the serious and escalating labor dispute Hyatt has with our union.  Workers at the Hyatt Regency have been working without a contract for over two years.  Hyatt workers in San Francisco have gone on strike three times and continue to make sacrifices in the fight against Hyatt’s mistreatment of its workers.  Contemporary Forums, a for-profit conference planning corporation and subsidiary of Reed Exhibitions, spends $2 million at Hyatt Hotels annually, and has violated this boycott seven times in the past year.

Hyatt Hotels has distinguished itself as the most abusive employer in the hotel industry:

• Room Cleaners at some Hyatt hotels have to clean up to 30 rooms a day in some cities, which is twice the union standard.
• In a study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine examining a total of 50 hotel properties from 5 different hotel companies, Hyatt housekeepers had the highest injury rate of all housekeepers studied.
• 99% of Hotel room cleaners are women. Most of these women are immigrants and face the highest risk of workplace injury in the service sector.

Multiple women’s rights groups have publicly endorsed the Hyatt boycotts,  including: The National Women’s Health Network, The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, Families USA, and Women Employed.

Groups that have honored Unite Here Local 2’s boycotts since 2009 include: NARAL, California Wellness Foundation, The National Center for Lesbian Rights, Breast Cancer Action, and The Latino Medical Students Association.

Attendees and speakers should not side with Hyatt against the women who work at these hotels.

We call on the speakers and attendees of Contraceptive Technologies to take action to honor this boycott and respect the wishes of the workers at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero.  Please sign the pledge to honor the boycott and contact the organizers of Contraceptive Technologies to tell them to move this event to a non-boycotted hotel:

Robert A. Hatcher

and

Pam Jenkins-Wallace

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