While the Hyatt and Yoga Journal have tried to minimize the long labor dispute between hotel management and workers – which led to a national boycott of the Hyatt chain that the Yoga Journal has repeatedly refused to abide, this weekend holding a conference here at the Hyatt Regency – labor activists have finally made progress in the yoga community in recent days.Read more »

Does inner peace include caring about the wellbeing of the workers cleaning up after your yoga conference? Jury's out in this particular case: this weekend, the Yoga Journal Conference will cross a hotel workers' union picket line for the third year in a row at the Hyatt Regency. Read more »

Nenita Ibe, who will turn 71 in February, says she still hasn’t fully recovered from a shoulder injury she sustained in March of 2009 during her housekeeping shift at the Hyatt Santa Clara. As she was lifting up a hefty padded mattress to tuck the sheets underneath, a task she’d completed hundreds of times before and continued to perform hundreds of times after, “I heard a crack in my shoulder,” she recalls.Read more »

San Franciscans this week saw the end result of long-running teacher union attacks on the re-election campaign of three SFUSD school board incumbents -- Sandra Fewer, Jill Wynns and Rachel Norton -- who were all reelected.Read more »

San Francisco's wage theft task force, approved in June, had its first meeting today.

The wage theft task force formed to strengthen the city response to workers exploited by wage theft, which can include non-payment of the minimum wage or of hours worked, non-payment of overtime, illegal deductions from worker paychecks, or failure to pay a worker at all.Read more »

The national domestic workers’ movement is on the cusp of making history in California. Any day now, the state’s Domestic Bill of Rights (AB 899) – only the second such piece of legislation in the country – could be passed on the Senate floor, finally bringing respect and recognition to 200,000 workers who have been systematically excluded from labor laws for 74 years.Read more »

Workers at Castlewood Country Club in Pleasanton, represented by UNITE HERE Local 2850, received a favorable decision from Administrative Law Judge Clifford Anderson of the National Labor Relations Board on Monday. He found that the club owes all 61 union workers two years of back pay-- and their jobs back.

"For the workers it feels like a relief to be believed in some way," said Local 2850 organizer Sarah Norr. "The workers have been saying for two years that Castlewood was not really trying to reach a compromise." Read more »

As contract negotiations with several employers come to an end August 1, the SEIU Local 87 janitors union has been coming out in force. More than 1,000 rallied in Union Square and marched over the weekend. Today, 500 janitors marched through the financial district.

“If we don’t get no contract, you don’t get no peace,” the crowd chanted as it marched down Market, before turning on First towards Mission. The group periodically stopped to picket intersections. Read more »

As shoppers scurried around Union Square yesterday, a picket that drew more than 300 people could be heard for blocks. The grand-scale noise-making was in front of the Grand Hyatt, where workers and supporters demonstrated against what they say is unsafe and unfair treatment of hotel workers.

UNITE HERE Local 2 has been supporting a boycott of a couple Hyatt locations in San Francisco for years now. But this week the national union, along with a broad coalition of supporters, has called for a worldwide boycott of the hotel chain.

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