It’s hardly unusual to find a glowing hagiography of a corporate CEO in the pages of a major newspaper. I’m not, per se, opposed to feting J.W. Marriott. If you can get past the creepy fact that he’s a high elder of the Mormon church, he’s just a charming old man who values family, tells hokey jokes and makes a point of being personally courteous to his workers. However, when the Washington Post goes so far as to twist the words of a leader of the hotel employees union to make the CEO of one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the country sound like a good boss, well, that’s when I get mad.
The Marriott corporation runs an anti-union operation as pervasive and sophisticated as Wal-Mart’s. First-line managers are trained to call the corporation’s central union-busting office at the slightest sign of discontent. Corporate’s union busters fly in and do the usual mix of firings, captive audience and one-on-one meetings, and maybe even a slight raise in wages – all in order to keep the status quo of “on-call” employment with no job protection.
The author of the piece, Michael Rosenwald, interviewed the hotel division president of UNITE HERE, John Wilhelm, for the piece. Wilhelm presumably used the opportunity to speak at length about Marriott’s anti-union track record – such as the fact that only ten percent of its operations are unionized compared to better than 30% of Hilton and Starwoods, or the briefly-alluded-to 20 year fight to unionize San Francisco’s flagship Marriott hotel – but the author shallowly focused on the few positive things that Wilhelm could say about J.W. Marriott.
Like, for instance, his common man touch when dealing with employees on a personal basis. Okay, so the man introduces himself and engages in chit chat with the bellmen and doormen when staying at one of his hotels. Well, that’s nice…I guess. But is this only notable because most corporate suits act like total dickheads around the “hired help?” How about the doozy that in the three cities where UNITE HERE has managed to make dealing with the union a cost of doing business that Marriott “live[s] up to the terms of the contracts?” When does living up to the legally enforceable contracts you have made become laudable, or even notable? Only in the context of a company that breaks the law with impunity when resisting its workers’ rights to organize and improve the job.
The Washington Post owes readers a complete picture of Marriott’s union-busting human resources policies, or else it owes us their traditional silence on wrong-doing when praising a charming elder statesman.