Some Chicago aldermen are determined to put City Hall in the middle of a six-year-old strike at the Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue. The City Council is set to vote Wednesday on an ordinance that would force any hotel in the city to notify its guests in advance if hotel workers have been on strike for more than two weeks.
Think of it as part harassment, part shaming.
Hotel advertising would have to include notice of the strike. The hotel couldn’t do business with online booking companies such as Expedia or Orbitz unless those Web sites included notice of the strike.
In other words, the city government would dictate to hotels and their business partners what they must say about their services.
That’s not a public safety issue. That’s not a public interest issue. That is a blatant violation of free speech rights.
This idea came up a few years ago, and the city’s lawyers advised then that it was legally infirm. The proposal died. But the Congress Plaza strike has dragged on and on; it’s a thorn in the side of organized labor. A lot of aldermen are afraid to cross organized labor, which showed its muscle in the last City Council election. So Ald. Ricardo Munoz, 22nd, and other council members are pushing the ordinance again.
City lawyers have advised that the proposed ordinance likely violates the National Labor Relations Act as well as the 1st Amendment.
But the Congress Plaza has become the hotel that aldermen love to hate. Ald. Robert Fioretti, 2nd, denied the hotel a permit to run a sidewalk cafe, clearly as retribution for the strike. U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Guzman ruled on Sept. 28 that the alderman’s action was illegal.
Guzman noted that Fioretti made clear he wouldn’t sign off on the cafe permit while the strike continued. That, wrote the judge, “impermissibly intruded into the collective bargaining process,” violating the federal labor relations act.
Chicago aldermen have no business getting in the middle of this dispute between a hotel and its employees’ union.
Fioretti and the city just got slapped down by a federal judge. And if the aldermen pass this ordinance, they’ll get slapped down once again.
They might see that as a badge of honor. But it would send a terrible message to the hotel industry and other businesses in Chicago. The hotel industry, by the way, is struggling: Revenues in Chicago are down 30 to 40 percent from last year and hundreds of jobs have been lost.
Unemployment is running high in Chicago, yet the aldermen seem intent on finding new ways to drive employers out of the city. People are on to that miserable record. A recent Tribune poll found that 66 percent of Chicagoans said the City Council has failed to bring job growth and economic development to the city. Just 12 percent said the aldermen have succeeded.
Harassing the city’s businesses doesn’t put anyone to work. Cut it out.
