Student Striker Alliance claims major victory for Holiday Inn Express Workers

Local 471 is proud to announce that we won a significant battle in our boycott of Jim Morrell's Holiday Inn Express in Latham. We have been turning guests away from the hotel for almost 6 months now, and just two weeks ago we succeeded in convincing Jim Morrell's biggest customer, GE, to pull their business. GE maintained a 12-20 room per night, year-round contract with the Holiday Inn Express that served as the hotel's economic anchor. In October, the striking workers reached out to student labor activists at Cornell University and got their help in mounting a campaign to get GE out. Serendipitously, GE's CEO Jeff Immelt happened to be the keynote speaker at a sustainable business conference at Cornell in early November, and students communicated to Immelt that they were going to protest his speech if his company continued crossing the strikers' picket line. The night before the speech and the accompanying scheduled protest, a global human resources director from GE called one of the students and asked for a meeting to negotiate. The next day, there was no protest and GE staff at the Holiday Inn Express packed up en masse and left the hotel for good. We hope that this powerful blow to Jim Morrell's hotel business shows him once again that the union means what it says and that he needs to do the right thing and negotiate with his workers.
For the whole story, see article in the Cornell Daily Sun: http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2009/11/16/student-group-pressures-ge-pull-business-hotel

For questions or information contact Bryn  brynroshong@gmail.com