This chapter discusses a campaign by the New York hotel workers to ensure new hotels built in East Midtown will employ unionized labor and continue to offer decent wages and benefits. This case shows how the New York Hotel Trades Council's (HTC) intervention in East Midtown formed part of a broader campaign to block hotel development in a sector that is increasingly fragmented by service format, and most worrisome, witnessing a rapid growth of hotels providing few services and competing on price, leading to a stronger employer opposition to unionization. The outcome of this case speaks unequivocally to organized labor's strength in New York City politics and to a growing recognition in real estate and policymaking circles of labor's importance in urban land use planning.
