Supporting Hyatt Workers and UNITE HERE Local 1 at the 2011 Annual Meeting of SAA
Some of us archivists have growing concerns regarding the long-standing labor dispute between UNITE HERE Local 1 and the management of the Hyatt Regency Chicago, the location of the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Most recently, this labor dispute has led to a one-day strike of housekeepers, dishwashers, bellmen and other hotel workers on June 20, 2011.
SAA has not given its membership any guidance to its membership about how to support UNITE HERE Local 1 and the Hyatt's hotel workers. Accordingly, my colleague Hillel Arnold and I have put together an website for archivists to find and share ideas.
This website, Support Hyatt Workers at SAA2011: An Unofficial Resource, is now live, and provides ideas for actions that anyone can perform, plus lists of those specifically for individuals who have either chosen not to attend and for those that are attending. This site allows anyone to contribute and comment either generally on a given page or in response to particular ideas. We are particularly eager to find new suggestions that we can incorporate into the site, and if people to prefer to submit their suggestions through us privately, they can do that as well.
For those who are curious, the site is powered by WordPress and Digress.it, a WordPress plugin that provides paragraph-level commenting in passages of text. Please let us know your ideas, and feel free to share this link wildly.