Hotel employees who are members of UNITE HERE Local 5 at the Ilikai hotel in Honolulu will resume their duties either later tonight or early tomorrow. The labor union and the company have successfully reached a contractual agreement to resolve the strike that commenced this morning at 6:00 a.m., when workers walked off the job and announced their intention to strike due to the absence of a new contract for over five years.
“We’ve been fighting for six years to show that all of us workers at the Ilikai Hotel are not second-class citizens, and today we finally won that fight,” said Merlinda Castro, housekeeper at Ilikai Hotel. “So many of us housekeepers are women who work hard every day to provide for our families so it means even more to me that we won a fair contract today on international woman’s day.”
Highlights of the tentative agreement:
• Immediate wage increases that bring Ilikai workers up to standard with other Waikiki hotel workers
• Immediate restoration of automatic daily room cleaning
• Housekeeping workload improvements
• Premium hourly increases for Bellman
• Improvements to meal & transit pass subsidies
• A process for dealing with newly introduced technologies
• Retirement with dignity
“Winning back automatic daily room cleaning is a huge victory,” said Pamela Balintona. “It’s a victory for the workers of Ilikai and for the guests who are paying top dollar, but not getting all the services they pay for.”
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