By Hannah Archambault, Jennifer Cohen, and Aaron Sojourner

 

Are you planning to attend the 2025 ASSA meetings in San Francisco? If so, then you are planning to attend events at a hotel where the employees either are currently on strike or where they have already voted to authorize their leadership to call a strike at any moment. All ASSA activities are planned for three ASSA headquarters hotels. Employees at two of these hotels – the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the San Francisco Marriott Union Square – are on strike and asking people to not meet, eat, nor sleep in the hotels. At the third headquarters hotel – the Parc 55 by Hilton –employees voted to authorize their leaders to call a strike at any moment. 

Picking up your registration badge would require you to cross a picket line and to enter one of the hotels at which employees are striking, as of today.

Did you book your housing through ASSA? If so, then you are booked at a hotel where workers are either currently on strike, where they authorized a strike, or where the union says there’s a real risk employees will be on strike in early January. All the ASSA’s original preferred hotels for housing are in one of these three categories, as detailed below.

What can a social scientist do as we face a conflict between our desires to:

• participate in the ASSA annual meeting in San Francisco taking place at hotels—both for meeting space and lodging—where workers currently are on strike or at risk of striking,
• respect the people employed by the hotels and their request of each of us to not meet, sleep, or eat in striking hotels as part of their wider local and national campaign to lift the industry’s job quality?

This blog walks through background and different strategies available to each of us. It includes a link to a petition in its Conclusion.

For context, Hannah is assistant professor at Fresno State and a member of URPE’s Steering Committee. She is a member of the California Faculty Association and committed to justice for all workers and the working class. Jennifer has belonged to the AEA since 2017 and has been an URPE Steering Committee member since 2019. She worked with a nursing union, DENOSA, in South Africa. Her ongoing research focuses on women and work in the health care sector. She is affiliated with Miami University, the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals, the Rutgers Program for Disability Research, and Ezintsha Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Aaron has belonged to AEA and LERA since 2009 and served as chair and in other roles on LERA@ASSA program committees. He started his career as an organizer for the carpenters union for five years. As a labor economist, his research includes labor unions. As a professor, he taught Labor Relations and Collective Bargaining at the University of Minnesota management school for over a decade. He served as senior economist for labor at CEA for a year. Aaron is speaking here in a personal capacity.

Background on the dispute

To give a sense of the issues, here’s a San Francisco Examiner article and a local NBC news story on it and an industry press article describing recent contract settlements in Boston and San Jose alongside continuing disputes in San Francisco and Honolulu. Here’s a statement from the union. We couldn’t find a statement from the hotel owners’ association. Please let us know if you find one. 

This Econofact blog and this Journal of Economic Perspectives article give more general background about the research on labor relations and unions in economics.

Corner “solutions”

One corner solution is to try to participate just the way you would have absent the strike. Try to ignore the hotel workers, cross their picket lines, and disregard their requests. 

We doubt you will be able to ignore them fully. Employees’ withdrawal of labor has led to deterioration in reported hotel service quality in struck hotels. Room cleaners, bell hops, check-in staff, restaurant staff, and other service workers and their family members will physically be marching between you and hotel doors. Picketing is an important way that federal law allows them to bargain collectively with their employer for better job quality. They will look you in the eye and loudly and clearly ask you to not enter the Hilton and Marriott headquarters hotels and many other hotels too, if they are on strike in early January.

The opposite corner solution is to cancel your plans to participate in the conference. The ASSA made official conference presentations fully in-person, though some sessions will be streamed online to attend remotely. The strike was authorized in a 94% in-favor vote by union members in August and started in September. The ASSA has remained quiet about the issue for months, so it snuck up on many people including us until recent weeks.

You can get a full refund of your ASSA registration fee if you cancel by this Tuesday, December 3. It would be good for ASSA to extend this deadline to Dec. 12 to allow time for people to catch up to the news and to align with the housing change deadline. If you have an ASSA hotel reservation, you must cancel it first (instructions below) and forward cancellation confirmation of your hotel room to assa@vanderbilt.edu along with your request for a conference registration refund. If you don’t want to cross any picket lines, this option has some appeal.

There’s a possibility that Parc 55 employees, or even the other hotels’, are not on strike in early January. Hopefully, all the disputes are settled before then but we do not see signs of progress in negotiations. If a settlement isn’t reached by early January, it seems quite likely the union will have expanded the strike to Parc 55 by then.

We and others are encouraging the ASSA to make a few small decisions specified in the Conclusion below, which would open space for participation in some conference activities without crossing a picket line. If ASSA does not do this by tomorrow at noon ET and we have to make a decision by ASSA’s Dec. 3 deadline, we are considering canceling our conference registrations by the ASSA’s deadline tomorrow for registration refunds. We don’t see how we can meaningfully participate in the conference under current conditions. This would disappoint us. The ASSA meeting is important. We want it to flourish. We respect and appreciate the allied associations’ leaders. It’s a difficult situation to navigate.

Between the corners are other strategies.

Avoid sleeping in hotels with disputes by switching your reservation

The single action with the highest ratio of worker-supportive benefit to cost, in my view, is switching your hotel reservation. It’s easy. It focuses impact on hotel managers. Below are resources to make this easy.

You can cancel your existing ASSA hotel reservation without any financial penalty until Dec. 12. Find your reservation confirmation number on an email from ASSAsupport@cmrus.com containing the phrase “Thank you for using ASSA Housing to make your hotel reservation for the 2025 ASSA Annual Meeting.” Follow the instructions near the bottom there. That process also has a way to communicate the reason to ASSA. Also, call the two hotels. Tell management why you cancelled your reservation at the old hotel and why you made the reservation at the new hotel. 

Here are the ASSA headquarters and other preferred lodging hotels and their statuses:

• ASSA headquarters hotels
  • Hilton San Francisco Union Square: on strike
  • Marriott Marquis: on strike
  • Parc 55: strike authorized
• Other ASSA original Preferred Lodging Hotels
  • Beacon Grand: at risk of strike
  • BEI San Francisco: at risk of strike
  • Clift Royal Sonesta San Francisco: at risk of strike
  • Grand Hyatt San Francisco Union Square: on strike
  • Hilton San Francisco Financial District: at risk of strike
  • Hyatt Regency San Francisco at Embarcadero: strike authorized
  • Hyatt Regency San Francisco Downtown SOMA: at risk of strike
  • InterContinental Mark Hopkins San Francisco: at risk of strike
  • InterContinental San Francisco: at risk of strike
  • Westin St Francis: on strike

Strike status information comes from the union here and here and is as of December 1.

The hotel workers union encourages people to patronize these 11 nearby hotels where employees are unionized, there are no strikes, no strike authorizations, and no risk of dispute based on the information here. As of now, there is affordable availability at those 11 union-recommended locations and Aaron just moved his reservation to one of them. Other options exist as well.

In an email this morning, AEA says ASSA can now help members make alternative hotel arrangements.  presumably outside the previously available hotels. We’re not sure which hotels they plan to send people to. Check against the list of 11 above if you’d like.

Buy meals and coffee outside the hotels with disputes

Patronize other local establishments for meals, snacks, and coffee. Communicate this to management of the labor-dispute hotels if you want them to be sure to notice. If applicable, mention this intention in the same call when you tell them why you cancelled your hotel reservation.

Move events outside the hotels with disputes

The ASSA signed contracts many years ago with these venues. It is in a tough position. It would be prohibitively expensive for them to provide meeting rooms outside the disputed facilities. The contract they signed lacks contingencies dealing with the degraded service hotels provide in the case of labor disputes. We hope you will join us in encouraging them to remedy this in future contracts, details below.

The workers are asking us to skip all the events in hotels with strikes. We will do that. We will not cross their picket line. We’re not sure if our employers will reimburse us if we travel but skip official panels. We may cancel altogether or will pay personally, if needed.

Multiple allied social science associations’ members have expressed unwillingness to cross picket lines. Multiple associations have together asked ASSA to allow them to move their panels to alternative locations in San Francisco or online. An ASSA spokesperson said they would delist such events from the official program, which would make it impossible for some presenters to get reimbursed and diminish scholars’ ability to use the presentation in their professional vitae.

One possibility would be for ASSA and/or constituent associations to hold events in alternative venues, ask individuals not to cancel conference registrations, and ask ASSA not to cancel or delist the event from the official program. Registrants could then meaningfully participate in the conference without crossing a picket line. This approach would respect the workers’ request, keep ASSA financially whole, and enable travel reimbursements. ASSA doesn’t verify specific individuals’ attendance at sessions, so this is not a policy change. It would require associations and individuals to make, finance, and communicate about alternative arrangements. ASSA could be helpful in that if it chooses.

Conclusion: Act ASAP?

Individually, we will each choose which strategies above to use. In addition, please consider signing your name to this petition to the ASSA asking them to do the following:

1. Extend the deadline to request a registration fee refund from December 3 to December 12 to line up with the housing deadline to give registrants time to digest new information,
2. Commit to not delist any session from the official catalog, including those occurring at alternative locations, unless the session’s organizing association requests delisting, and
3. Commit to incorporate protective language into future venue contracts to enable ASSA to make alternative arrangements in the case of labor disputes during the conference.

If ASSA does 2, we see a path to our meaningful participation in the conference and will not cancel our conference registrations, hoping either for dispute resolution or off-site activities to attend. 3 also seems to have value.

The communications this morning from AEA to members and ASSA to registrants grew out of conversations we and many others have had with them around these issues. We hope for additional progress on these issues.