This is How Owners Treat Workers

This is not news; it happens every day to millions of anonymous workers at thousands of anonymous workplaces all around the country. But the bullying owners they must battle don't usually have a famous name and an even more famous friend in the White House.

Teddy Partridge at Firedoglake:

Penny Sue Pritzker, the Hyatt Hotels heiress whose Superior Bank subprime loan corruption made her unfit to serve as Barack Obama’s Commerce Secretary, has a strike on her hands at the Park Hyatt in Chicago, where temperatures approached 100 degrees today.

Penny Sue’s response to the workers striking for better conditions for housekeepers after almost two years of stalled negotiations? Turn on the heat lamps under the glass awnings, right where the picket line is.

In case you didn’t know, Hyatt is owned by the Pritzker family. Heiress, Penny Sue Pritzker chairs Obama’s national campaign finance committee. She is also big player in Democratic Party politics as well as in the world of anti-union, corporate school reform and was recently appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to a seat on the Chicago school board.

Pritzker’s response to the Park Hyatt strikers was to turn on the hotel’s powerful heating lamps to try and bake the workers into submission on this brutally hot day. But this seemingly inhuman and probably illegal response seemed to have had just the opposite effect. Picketers began chanting, “Hyatt can’t take the heat, but we can!” The lamps were left on until word got out and media began to show up.

This is how Barack Obama’s rich friends treat workers seeking humane conditions in the workplace. It’s no wonder he wants to cut your Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Here’s what the Boston Hyatt did to union workers:

The union says the Boston Hyatt replaced 100 housekeepers with temps making minimum wage. That, they say, is what they’re fighting.

That will probably earn Penny Sue Pritzker a standing ovation at Obama’s next campaign finance committee meeting.

No, Pritzker has not hired Pinkerton goons to beat and shoot the strikers, but the attitude of owners toward workers who demand humane conditions and civil treatment has not changed in 150 years of fighting for unions.