Photo by Justin Ennis
At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, one couldn’t walk five feet through Marriott Wardman Park Hotel without hearing some columnist, elected official or ordinary attendee inveigh against some liberal scourge: President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, New England academics, Planned Parenthood, Occupy Wall Street, the media and labor, especially labor.
Throughout the conference, speaker after speaker slammed the perceived noose-like grip organized workers—union members counting for a towering 12 percent of the national workforce—over the economy. Among those fêted for their anti-union efforts was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose agenda last year to weaken public-sector employees’ unions was a flashpoint for supporters of labor rights.
Union members also accounted for the majority of a large protest outside CPAC early Friday afternoon. The rally included representatives of the United Steelworkers, Teamsters, the Communications Workers of America and other organizations. The crowd was riled up, the chants vociferous.
Inside the conference, however, there might have been a more subtle protest at work. Over at Raw Story, Megan Carpentier reports that many hotel employees wore their union pins while serving an ardently anti-labor crowd:
Though some of the contract employees brought in to serve CPAC’s needs were not unionized, the Marriott Wardman Park (like CPAC’s original home, the Omni Shoreham) is a union hotel — which means its employees are organized under the banner of UNITE HERE’s Local 25. And, as part of their contract, every employee is allowed to wear their union button under their Marriott nametag. The buttons ranged from the above subtle button to one displaying a white, cougar-like paw print on a black background to more simple text buttons. But for each, the message was clear to those who noticed: we’re union employees, and we’re not going to hide it, even at CPAC.
But anti-union screeds weren’t the only CPAC speeches felt by Marriott employees. Some of the hotel’s workers who are also immigrants felt stung by the conference’s seemingly open disdain toward foreigners. A banquet employee, Mahbubul Murshed, told Carpentier he was hurt by having to listen to some of those addresses:
As is often the case with low-skill service jobs in large American cities, many of the workers at the Marriott Wardman Park are recent immigrants — including Murshed, who legally immigrated from Bangladesh. He took issue with some of the anti-immigration sentiment on display at the conference. “All the white folks in the United States, what was their route?” he asked, noting that the earliest settlers of the continent hadn’t asked the indigenous people for their permission to immigrate. “My kids were born here, but they are called ‘Indian’ instead of ‘American’ because they are not white,” he said, “But no one ever calls this guy ‘Italian’ or that guy ‘Spanish’ instead of ‘American.’” He added, “Because of our color, our appearance, our face, we are not treated as Americans.”
Still, despite spending several days a group that often sounded like it was targeting his employment status and his origin, Murshed and his colleagues did their jobs, but made sure to remind the CPAC attendees they are union members and proud of it.
