San Francisco hotel workers near the end of a 3-month strike

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (AP) — The last group of striking hotel workers in San Francisco are voting Tuesday to approve a tentative agreement for a new contract with Hilton, ending a strike that has lasted three months.

The vote comes after similar deals were made with Marriott and Hyatt in the past week, bringing an end to the strike for around 1,750 workers at those hotels, according to the union Unite Here Local 2.

Since September, more than 10,000 hotel workers have gone on strike in 11 cities across the U.S. The San Francisco strike grew to include about 2,500 hotel workers, according to Unite Here Local 2. Some were arrested during a demonstration in October as union members sat in a busy street by a Hilton hotel.

The agreement with Hilton would cover about 900 workers, including 650 workers who have been on strike for over three months at the Hilton hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood and 250 workers who were prepared to strike at another Hilton property across the street, the union said.

“We believe this agreement is beneficial to both our team members and our hotels,” Hilton Senior Vice President Paul Ades said in a statement. “We look forward to welcoming our team members back to work and continuing to provide our guests with our signature hospitality.”

The union said the deal includes preserving workers’ union health insurance plans, wage increases, and new protections against understaffing and workload increases. The new contract would expire in 2028.

“These 93 days have not been easy, and I’m so proud that my coworkers and I never gave up,” Bill Fung, a janitor at the Union Square hotel, said in a statement. “We stood together through the rain and cold, and even though there were some hard days, it was all worth it.”

Hundreds of hotel workers represented by the Culinary Workers Union are still on strike in Las Vegas after walking off the job in mid-November amid a contentious fight for a new contract with Virgin Hotels. It is the union’s longest strike in more than two decades.

In March of this year, hotel workers in Southern California ratified contracts with more than 30 hotels after repeated strikes in the summer of 2023.

The Associated Press