Anaheim Resort union interests have dumped another $150,000 into their independent expenditure campaigns supporting Ashleigh Aitken for mayor and Al Jabbar and Carlos Leon for city council.  All three candidates are Democrats. The $150,000 came from UNITE-HERE Local 11, a militantly progressive union that primarily represents hotel workers. $100,000 went into an IE committee supporting Aitken and Leon, and the ...

A militant hotel workers union hopes to place on the November 2024 ballot an initiative to impose a $25 an hour minimum wage on Anaheim hotels and event centers – while exempting hotels and event centers from that and other burdensome mandates if they agree to unionize. On August 29, UNITE-HERE Local 11 filed paperwork with the Anaheim City Clerk ...

[Originally published in Eyeson11.com] UNITE-HERE Local 11’s 2021 financial documents are out, and the results are even more damning than in 2020. Local 11’s leaders – Ada Briceño, Susan Minato, and Kurt Petersen — avoided pay cuts during the pandemic, even as most of the union’s members found themselves out of a job. This past year, they gave themselves a raise. Last ...

[Originally published in Eyeson11.com] In advance of its annual financial filings with the Office of Labor Management Standards, Unite Here Local 11 filed a bombshell amendment to its 2020 LM-2. (We covered last year’s filings in detail here.) The originally-reported 37 percent drop in membership in 2020 was in fact twice as large: Local 11’s membership plummeted from 28,649 members in 2019 to ...

Last month, the Center for Union Facts filed a complaint  with the U.S. Small Business Administration urging Administrator Guzman to investigate potential abuse of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) committed by Unite Here Local 11. The complaint, which was sent to Administrator Guzman on January 21, 2022, outlines disturbing issues regarding a union-linked nonprofit that were recently reported by the Washington Free Beacon. The nonprofit ...

[This story originally appeared on Eyes on Local 11 on November 30, 2021]  In March 2020, Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), unleashing billions in emergency loans for COVID-affected businesses – loans meant to help them keep their workers employed. When PPP loans were originally introduced, labor unions were not allowed to apply. But, there was a loophole that allowed a union’s ...

Last week, Orange County Superior Court Judge William Claster ruled that a 2018 Anaheim ballot measure requiring businesses that receive a city tax subsidy does not apply to the Disneyland Resort, pointing to how Measure L – which was written and placed on the ballot by the Coalition of Resort Labor Unions (CRLU) – defined a tax subsidy. In his ...

On January 24, 2019, the militant hotel workers union UNITE-HERE Local 11 orchestrated a shut-down of the busy intersection of Katella Avenue and Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim. It was a deliberate attempt disrupt the opening day of the NAMM Show – the Anaheim Convention Center’s biggest trade show. Local 11 was in a labor dispute with the Sheraton Anaheim Hotel, ...

Leading by example must not be a concept hotel worker union Unite Here Local 11 is familiar with. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, 95 percent of Local 11’s members found themselves unemployed. How did union leaders respond? By allegedly pressuring members to keep up with their dues payments, all the while fighting to keep hotels closed and members ...

The Disneyland Resort has reached return-to-work agreements with 11 of its cast member unions. These agreements implement a set of COVID-19 health and safety measures and protocols that will be in place when cast members return to their jobs whenever Governor Newsom gets around to allowing the Resort to re-open. The unions in question represent the large majority of Resort ...