Roughly half of Santa Monica’s luxury hotel workers have become unionized, now that a majority of the staff at the Sheraton Delfina have given their thumbs-up.

Nearly 100 employees of the Sheraton Delfina have joined the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 11 (HERE) since an Aug. 26 vote in which 58 employees voted in favor of unionization and 32 voted against it.

While half of the hotel employees targeted by HERE will now be represented by a union contract, only three of the 10 city hotels the union has in its crosshairs — those it considers high-end — have become unionized. Still, workers from the Sheraton, Viceroy and Fairmont Miramar comprise about half the 10 hotels’ collective staff.

HERE representatives said the collective bargaining process, set to begin next week, will improve the employees’ experience at the hotel with better pay, hours and health care.

However, some who aren’t relishing the victory. The decision comes in light of a nearly twoyear legal battle between HERE, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and an anti-union watchdog group called the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), based in Virginia.

Kurt Petersen, HERE’s director responsible for the local unionizing effort, said the approval means that both full- and part-time employees will have access to a decent family health care plan, accrue vacation time and a pension. Employees also will have greater job security, an opportunity to address grievances and the option to negotiate a reduced workload, Petersen said.

“This is a great thing for hotel workers in Santa Monica,” Petersen said. “This will lift the standard here at the Sheraton and for other workers in the community.”

It’s also a long time in coming, according to Petersen. In December of 2003, the Sheraton management and its workers held a check-card process, when it was agreed union officials would have a period of time to gather support from a majority of workers. The result was that a majority of workers agreed to unionize.

But shortly after, seven workers from the Sheraton filed a complaint with the NLRB, alleging hotel employees were coerced into unionizing and that a majority actually didn’t want to be organized.

Opponents of the check-card process say it’s unfair to workers, who can be approached by organizers and lobbied on an individual basis. They claim pacts are formed and often include unlawful prearrangements over employment terms and conditions, including health care, wages or union dues.

Some Sheraton employees have said they felt harassed into signing union authorization cards and they were turned off by aggressive organizing tactics, adding the promises of better wages and reduced workloads didn’t hold. Plus, they said they didn’t want to pay the $37 monthly dues. Some told stories of relatives who had bad experiences with unions.

The disgruntled signees then penned a petition stating they no longer wanted union representation. But, apparently, their votes counted toward unionizing anyway, resulting in a majority even though only a minority of employees agreed to a union, according to their complaint filed with the NLRB.

However, the NLRB’s Los Angeles regional office in February of 2004 sided with HERE by ruling that the union had a majority and employees weren’t coerced. That’s when the Virginia-based defense foundation stepped in and began representing the seven workers in the case.

In September of 2004, the Washington, D.C. office of the NLRB reversed the LA office and agreed with the defense foundation that a majority of the Sheraton’s hotel workers hadn’t backed unionization.

Months later, the NLRB issued a formal complaint stating HERE “has been restraining and coercing employees” by representing them for the last 18-plus months without consent from the majority. The Sheraton was found to be unlawfully assisting and supporting the union, according to the complaint.

Union officials were preparing to fight the charges at an April 4, 2005 trial, but the case was settled just days before it was scheduled to be heard.

Petersen said the NLRB’s Washington D.C. office ruling was political, spurred by big business interests who want to decimate unions throughout the country. Earlier this year, he told the Daily Press that the union didn’t want to drag the workers through more years of bureaucracy and it did have a majority at the hotel, adding that the motivation to settle was that HERE wanted to move forward with new organizing efforts.

Although HERE agreed, as part of the settlement, to withdraw its efforts at the Sheraton, union organizers have been working with employees over the past few months. Workers agreed to take a formal vote to unionize on Aug. 26, during which the majority prevailed.

The workers who agreed to unionize did so because of the benefits associated with it — like increased salaries and reduced workload. The labor agreement called for average wage increases of 20 percent, free health benefits for full- and part-time employees, a pension plan, reduced workloads and paid lunch breaks, among other benefits and protections for Sheraton workers, labor organizers have said.

The Sheraton is Santa Monica’s third largest hotel to be unionized, following the Viceroy and Fairmont Miramar. Organizers have pledged to unionize all of Santa Monica’s major luxury hotels, including Loews, the Doubletree Guest Suites, Le Merigot, Casa Del Mar, Shutters on the Beach, the Radisson Huntley Hotel and the Holiday Inn Santa Monica Pier.

Justin Hakes, communications director for the defense foundation, said the vote to go union still has its critics, who will continue to keep an eye on the process.

“With union officials’ history of trampling employees’ freedom from compulsory unionism, we will be closely monitoring the situation to ensure that future abuses of employees rights do not occur,” he said.