Airbnb Inc cafeteria workers are joining the United Auto Workers (UAW), a new twist in the home-rental company’s troubled relationship with organized labor.
The UAW won a union contract covering nearly 150 cafeteria workers at four Airbnb facilities. It is the latest development in a unionization trend among tech companies’ sub-contracted staff.
“Every worker should be treated with dignity and justice,” Airbnb global head of policy and public affairs Chris Lehane said in an e-mailed statement on Thursday afternoon. “Airbnb has great respect for the labor movement, and we are glad to have UAW represent workers who provide services to our employees.”
Photo: AP
The workers, who are employed by the food service contractor Bon Appetit and work in San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, unionized in November last year and completed contract negotiations last month. Employees will receive raises of at least 5 percent in the initial year of the contract as well as major improvements to their benefits, according to the union.
“We believe the dishwashers, servers and chefs working for Bon Appetit and serving Airbnb employees are now among the highest-paid food service workers in California,” Gary Jones, a UAW regional director covering 17 Western and Southwestern states, said in a statement.
When negotiating with Bon Appetit to service its cafeterias, Airbnb required that the vendor remain neutral on whether its employees unionize, said a spokesman for Airbnb.
While the relationship between businesses and unions is often fraught, the UAW news is a coup of sorts for Airbnb. The company has been battling organized labor elsewhere, while trying to find a labor organization it can build a kinship with.
Unite Here, a hospitality union, has played a major role in funding, planning and mobilizing opposition to Airbnb, citing its alleged removal of affordable housing units from the market and displacement of hotel employees. The New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, a Unite Here affiliate, has partnered with the hotel industry to successfully push for stricter regulation of the company and to fund a campaign that includes deploying private investigators for undercover stings designed to prove Airbnb hosts in the city are in fact operating illegal hotels.
Share Better, a group backed by Unite Here, the hotel industry, housing groups and elected officials, said on Thursday that the new Airbnb effort does not go far enough.
“When Airbnb voluntarily recognizes and signs a fair contract with a union for their 2,500 person global workforce, then we will congratulate them for taking an authentically pro-union position,” Share Better spokesman Austin Shafran wrote in an e-mailed statement. “But cherry-picking certain unions to work with is just another manipulative attempt by a company dealing with one public relations crisis after another.”
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