When Anbang Insurance Group Co (安邦保險集團) bought the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for US$1.95 billion this year, the Chinese firm said it planned to convert part of the aging building into high-end condominiums, while maintaining a smaller five-star hotel.
Standing in its way were the hotel’s 1,221 union workers, whose jobs were protected by the Waldorf Astoria’s contract with the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, a union that represents hotel workers.
Now, the owners of the Waldorf, New York’s largest union hotel employer, have reached a record deal with the union in which the hotel could pay almost US$149 million in severance packages to its employees over the next two years.
The average payout will be more than US$142,000, with a handful of employees eligible for more than US$300,000. One longtime worker is walking away with US$656,409.68.
“It is a great deal,” said Peter Ward, head of the trades council. “There are people of retirement age, hundreds of them, that are getting over US$200,000 in severance.”
Edgar Infante, 53, a head room-service waiter who has worked at the hotel for 22 years, is one of them.
“It will never be the same again,” Infante said. “When Frank Sinatra was alive he would ask me always for a Jack Daniels with a splash of Evian. Later in his life, when he got sickly, it was an Evian with a splash of Jack.”
Former US president Bill Clinton knows Infante by name and in Infante’s basement at home he keeps a Waldorf menu signed by Clinton and former US president George H.W. Bush when the two met at the Waldorf after Hurricane Katrina.
Under the terms of the deal, employees will receive 29 days of pay per year they worked, or 58 days if they are tipped employees. The typical severance package is just four days of pay per year, or eight days for tipped employees.
“In terms of days of pay, this is the largest severance package that we have negotiated in the history of the union,” said Richard Maroko, the union’s general counsel.
The trade council negotiated with Hilton Worldwide, which operates the Waldorf, and the Blackstone Group, which owns 46 percent of the hotel chain, over several months this spring. (Hilton will continue to operate the Waldorf in a 100-year agreement it signed with the new owner.)
As the negotiations were occurring, a bill backed by the union was making its way through the city council that would have placed a moratorium on hotel-to-condominium conversions like the one the Waldorf is planning.
Last month, the council approved the legislation, placing a two-year ban on owners of Manhattan hotels with at least 150 rooms from converting more than 20 percent to condominiums, but hotels that had been purchased in the previous 24 months and where the buyers had expressed an intent to convert were exempt, including the Waldorf.
Employees have three choices: take their severance now and stop working within 60 days; take part of their severance now, but continue working for two years or until the hotel closes, whichever comes first, and then receive the rest of the severance; or continue working until the hotel closes, then take the smaller, traditional union severance and go on a rehire list.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to