Hotel workers' strike and the 2025 ASSA annual meeting - Update v6

By Hannah Archambault, Jennifer Cohen, and Aaron Sojourner

12/24 update: Great news on the labor situation at ASSA hotels. The hotel workers and owners have reached agreements and the strike is over. Marriott & the UNITE HERE Local 2 reached agreement first, then Hyatt, and last Hilton. The affected members at Marriott voted 99.8% to ratify new contract, at Hyatt the vote to ratify was unanimous, and at Hilton 99.4% voted to ratify.

With contracts in place, the workers agree not to strike and it’s back to business. Looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco. Happy holidays!

The ASSA official program should have all information accurately. LERA’s activities will occur in the originally planned Parc 55, rather than Hotel Spero. The associations that moved to the Marker will remain there.

12/17 update: we are collecting information about panels that are making contingency plans for alternative locations (and perhaps date/time) and will publicize the alternative arrangements if the strike doesn’t resolve by conference start.

If you want your panel’s alternative arrangement added to this listing, have the panel organizer fill out this form. If you want to sign up for our email updates, use this form.

Many associations have moved their ASSA activities from original headquarters hotels and the ASSA has updated the official program to reflect this. In particular, activities of the following associations are now at the following hotels.

AFEE: Marker Hotel
ASE: Marker Hotel
ASHEcon: Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel
HES: Marker Hotel
IAFFE: Marker Hotel
LERA: Spero Hotel
URPE: Marker Hotel

Other associations are still planning to use the original headquarters hotels. Workers will likely still be striking. We see three main options for participants in those panels:

Expect to cross a picket line,
Arrange to send a pre-recorded video to be played for those in attendance, or
Hold the panel at an alternative location.

Options 2 and 3 are not condoned by ASSA.

Option 2: this option has appeal if some, but not most, panel participants won’t cross a picket line. We have heard indirectly that ASSA suggested option 2 to concerned individuals. ASSA has expressly said that they do not want people presenting remotely in hybrid mode.

Option 3: this has some appeal if most participants don’t want to cross a picket line. It raises two main issues. First, the panel needs to secure an alternative location. Some panel organizers have done this. We can provide leads on alternative locations to interested folks. Second, the official ASSA program will still list the panel’s official location, rather than the alternative location, so some audience members may not find the panel.

We are collecting information about panels that are following option 3 and will publicize their alternative locations (and date-time, if applicable) if the strike doesn’t resolve by conference start.

If you want your panel’s alternative arrangement added to this listing, have the panel organizer fill out this form. If you want to sign up for our email updates, use this form.

The ASSA has the power to delist a participant or panel from the official program that pursues options 2 or 3, which could jeopardize those individuals’ reimbursements depending on employer. We don’t think ASSA would do this because it would harm people. But they have that option.

12/6 update: Today, the Labor and Employment Relations Associations (LERA) emailed out the following:

“RE: LERA@ASSA Hotel and Meeting Space Update in Response to UNITE HERE Local 2 strikes in San Francisco

“LERA@ASSA Meeting Presenter/Participant,

“All of the San Francisco hotels involved in the upcoming ASSA/AEA Conference, Jan. 3-5, 2025, have either authorized a strike or are actively striking, including the LERA headquarters hotel, the Parc 55. As you know, LERA is 100% in support of collective bargaining, and we will not cross a picket line nor ask our members to do so.

“After gathering input from our stakeholders, and communicating our concerns with the ASSA, LERA has secured alternative meeting space at a nearby hotel, and we have moved our meeting sessions to the Hotel Spero. The hotel is listed as a fair hotel by UNITE HERE. It is also close to our original site, the Parc 55, and for any who wish to change their sleeping room accommodations to the new LERA headquarters hotel (there are other fair hotel options to consider as well), the ASSA has extended their deadline to alter your existing hotel room reservation in their system without penalty to December 12, 2024. If the Parc 55 hotel settles their contract with UNITE HERE, LERA would then be able to consider moving our meeting sessions back.

“Hotel Spero is outside of the ASSA’s room block, so if you choose to move your sleeping room reservation to this specific hotel, you would need to personally contact Hotel Spero and make your room reservation with them directly, then cancel your existing hotel reservation through the ASSA’s conference system, all prior to the ASSA’s extended deadline of Dec. 12. After that date, penalties will apply for altering an existing hotel room reservation in the ASSA’s system.

“LERA sessions will be conducted at: Hotel Spero, 405 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102… Please refer to the UNITE HERE Fair Hotel website for a comprehensive listing of your other fair hotel options in San Francisco.

“Plan to pick up your ASSA/AEA name badge and meeting materials from LERA staff at the Hotel Spero, and look for more details in the coming days. The program sessions, dates, and times remain unchanged.

“Thank you for your patience as we continue to finalize logistics, and we look forward to seeing and hearing from you in San Francisco.”

12/3 update: Lots of good news yesterday from ASSA. They:

informed all registrants about the ongoing labor issues,
extended the deadline for registration refunds from Dec. 3 to Dec. 12 to give people time to process the information and make an informed decision,
told allied associations that the associations could hold conference activities at alternative locations in San Francisco outside the originally planned 3 headquarters hotels, providing a realistic path for meaningful participation for the many participants unwilling to cross a picket line,
stated they would seek protective language in future conference venue contracts that would guard the ASSA against the contingency of being locked into venues in the middle of labor disputes.

Each association will make its own decisions. AEA is planning to keep their sessions in locations now on strike or at risk of strike.

We look forward to seeing you (outside any picket lines) at ASSA 2025! The ASSA meeting is important. We want it to flourish. We appreciate the challenging situation facing the allied associations’ leaders and their work in navigating it.

Read below about the issues and how to make informed choices about your hotel reservation and other options you face. We updated the blog here given the new developments. The original blog text is archived here for reference.

Do you want to us to keep you informed of notable developments in the San Francisco hotel workers labor dispute and how it may affect activities for participants at ASSA 2025? We plan to stay on top of these issues and provide practical guidance going forward through tightly-curated email updates. We aim to communicate as infrequently as possible while providing actionable news, analysis, and opportunities for conference participants. Sign up here.

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Are you planning to attend the 2025 ASSA meetings in San Francisco? All ASSA activities have been planned for three ASSA headquarters hotels. Employees at two of these hotels – the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the San Francisco Marriott Marquis – 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.

Yesterday, ASSA stated that allied associations can move planned sessions to alternative physical locations in San Francisco at their own expense and ASSA will facilitate updating of location information within their program system. This means there is a path to meaningful participation in the conference without crossing picket lines.

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 preferred hotels for housing are in one of these three categories, as detailed below. The hotel workers union has asked people not to patronize these hotels.

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.

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.

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.

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, bellhops, 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 ASSA has extended the deadline to request a registration fee refund to December 12. 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.

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 our view, is switching your hotel reservation. 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.

The union is asking people to avoid staying at hotels where: 1) workers are on strike, 2) have a strike authorized, or 3) at the hotels they classify at-risk for a strike expansion. All the ASSA hotels are in one of these groups. 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 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 above is as of December 1 and comes from the union here and here. The Fair Hotel information is updated regularly and the UNITE HERE page is current as of December 1. These statuses can change.

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. Aaron moved his reservation to one of them. Other options exist as well.

In an email this morning, ASSA noted that its system can help members make alternative hotel arrangements to avoid currently-struck hotels. That means moving from currently-struck hotels in the ASSA preferred group to other (strike authorized and at-risk) hotels within the group. The union is asking people not to book rooms at any of these hotels. The union would prefer people move to one of the 11 nearby hotels described in the prior paragraph.

On balance, all these moves are in a worker-supportive direction. Moving to one of the 11 rather than one of the other ASSA hotels is more “worker supportive” but less “ASSA supportive.”

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 is in a tough position, having signed contracts many years ago with these venues. It would be prohibitively expensive for them to provide meeting rooms outside the disputed facilities. The contract ASSA signed lacks contingencies dealing with the degraded service hotels provide in the case of labor disputes. Yesterday, ASSA said they will seek to incorporate such contingencies in any future conference venue contracts.

The workers are asking us to skip all the events in hotels with strikes. We personally will do that. We will not cross their picket lines. Many other allied social science associations’ members have also expressed unwillingness to cross picket lines. Multiple associations together asked ASSA to allow them to move their panels to alternative locations in San Francisco or online.

The ASSA leadership has stated that allied associations can move planned sessions to alternative physical locations and ASSA will facilitate updating of location information within their system. Presentations do have to be in-person.

ASSA would prefer that sessions are held within the ASSA block of hotels. All of the ASSA block hotels are involved in labor disputes or negotiations on some level and could be pulled into strike action quickly. In deciding on event locations, associations and participants will have to balance multiple factors including ASSA preferences, ease of registrant access, strike activity risks, financial constraints, and their members’ preferences.

AEA is planning to keep their sessions in locations now on strike or at risk of strike.

Conclusion

We appreciate the ASSA leadership setting policies that enable meaningful participation without crossing picket lines and look forward to seeing you (outside the picket lines) at ASSA 2025! We will each choose which strategies above to use. Feel free to DM @aaronsojourner.org on Bluesky if you have questions.

Hotel workers’ strike and the 2025 ASSA annual meeting – Update v6