Rich Maroko Runs Perhaps the Most Powerful U.S. Union in the Hotel Trades Council

A union representing 40,000 hotel workers — not auto workers, airline pilots or teachers — has become one of the most powerful labor organizations in the United States.

How so? The Hotel & Gaming Trades Council (HTC) has championed New York legislation that protected members while weakening their nonunionized competitors, successfully helped several candidates ascend to higher office, and secured generous unemployment benefits for laid-off workers.

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Rich Maroko has been an essential force behind the HTCs victories and endorsements since joining the union as its general counsel in 2002 and becoming its president in 2020. During his tenure, he has grappled with a rapid influx of hotels — New York City added 54,000 rooms between 2007 and 2020 — followed by a global pandemic that kept his members out of work far longer than other industries. 

On May 18, Maroko secured record-high wage increases for those members, allowing housekeepers to earn more than $100,000 per year by the end of their new contract. 

Maroko spoke with Commercial Observer in early March about what he expects in HTC’s latest work agreement, laws that restricted new hotel construction and short-term rentals, and his union’s endorsement process. CO reconnected in May following the union’s contract resolution. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Commercial Observer: What does the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council look for when negotiating a new contract?

Rich Maroko: We have always taken pride in our ability not just to negotiate really good contracts but to enforce those contracts once we win them. Our union has been around for 100 years. It absolutely delivers for its members. We’re able to win really good wages for our members — pension plans and affordable health care — and the reason we’re able to do that is a combination of factors. 

First and foremost, it’s the members. They are a union through and through. That’s the culture of the hotel workers union. It’s something we work hard at by spending time and resources to make sure our members are informed, active and militant. And we take time to make sure we commit resources to make sure we enforce contracts and resolve grievances. We have an exceptionally loyal base of members. That’s where a lot of our bargaining power comes from — a strong and united membership.

We work to make sure we do everything we can to maximize our leverage to ensure we can win those contracts. Our political program is designed for our ability to win good contracts. Part of that is making sure we have power and making sure the industry is healthy enough to afford the wage increases and benefits our members deserve.

You ratified a new contract with the Hotel Association of New York City on May 18, a couple of days ago. What was the most challenging part of the negotiations?  

For us, and really for the industry, it was the major economics, first and foremost among them the wage increases for our workers. The cost of living spike has really hit our members hard, making it increasingly difficult to afford to live in the city where they work. Getting them wage increases they deserve and they do deserve it, was our No. 1 priority.

We were able to get historic wage increases, and, over the eight-year term of the track, room attendants will get an increase of $21.20, which really is what they need to be able to continue to afford to live in the city. That represents a 50 percent increase in their salary over the life of their contract. It is needed and deserved.

The second major challenge we’re facing was around health care. Our members are entitled to free family health care. Our benefit fund saw significantly increased costs over the last year because of the spike in hospitalization and out-of-area coverage. In order to maintain free family health care coverage, that required employees to contribute more than they had been and we were able to do that. That was a line in the sand for us. 

In addition we increased contributions to the pension fund and achieved additional paid time off, such as entitling workers to paid family leave when they have an adopted child. We also secured brand-new funds to help our members with cost-of-living issues like health care and childcare. We also had to address resolutions like protecting our members’ jobs against threats of technology whether it’s AI or automation. 

In the end, it was a great deal.

Can you tell us how you ended up with the $100,000 annual salary figure for housekeepers?

That is just how the increases played out.  Housekeepers will go from $39.87 per hour to $61.07 per hour, a roughly 53 percent increase. That’s for a 35-hour work week. When you look at the room attendant salary, by year six, a full-time room attendant will earn that.

What we negotiated over was the annual increase that all of our members would get on July 1, which is the date the new contract will go into effect. We negotiated an increase for each year over the eight years. By year six, it would be over $100,000. There wasn’t a discussion about what the annual salary was. We’re negotiating over what the annual wage increase will be by July 1. 

Were you able to increase wages for other workers by a similar amount? 

The increases apply across the board to all the non-tipped workers. Tipped workers get half of that, and that is every year in July. For the vast majority of our members, and they all have different wage rates, it averages to about a 50 percent increase in their take-home pay by the end of the contract.

How did you prepare for your negotiations and the possibility of a work stoppage?

As the adage goes, we hope for peace but prepare for war. 

We always have to be prepared. We have thought about this for the past five to six years. In 2021, the city passed a law requiring hotels to notify guests if there’s a service disruption [during a strike] — a consumer protection notification law — and subsequently went on to increase unemployment insurance benefits throughout New York state.

Unemployment benefits had been capped at $504 per week, which doesn’t pay the rent in New York City. We pushed the state to get them to increase the benefit to over $850 per week, and we reduced the waiting period for striking workers, which is just one week. Striking workers fighting for a fair contract deserve to pay rent and buy groceries while they are out there. Those changes we made in anticipation for a potential strike.

The unemployment benefits in New York had been woefully low. The way it was resolved on the state level was paying off the insurance trust [the federal Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund loan], which was in the red. It benefits every New Yorker who lost their job, but it’s also good for employers because their premiums went down.

The negotiations were resolved before tourists will arrive for the World Cup, yet bookings have lagged expectations. How will that affect your workforce? 

I am not doom and gloom about the prospect of the industry doing really well during the World Cup and America’s 250th birthday celebrations. It’s not uncommon to see a lag before a large sporting event, and, when you’re talking about something like the World Cup, that’s particularly true. Folks know who is going to be in the first round, but they may wait to see if their team makes it to further rounds and the final. 

I expect the industry to be doing well during the World Cup. Their projections for occupancy and rates continue to improve year over year. New York has always been a premier destination even when you have tailwinds happening in other markets. There’s a built-in stream of guests whether it’s leisure, corporate, domestic or international.

Business leaders recently proposed pausing a city rule in order to allow short-term rentals to operate during the period when the World Cup is in town. Do you support this idea?

The World Cup is an amazing opportunity for our city, the tourism industry, and the workers who make events like this possible. It can’t be treated as a free-for-all where greedy tech companies can ignore the law in order to jack up profits at the expense of New Yorkers. Unregulated short-term rentals do not just harm jobs. They put tenants at risk of displacement, drive up costs for property owners, and make homeownership even further out of reach for working families. 

As we prepare for the World Cup, we thank Mayor Mamdani for reaffirming his commitment to putting New Yorkers first.

What lessons have you taken from other workers, such as city nurses who have struck this year?  

It doesn’t have any effect other than it highlights the climate right now, which is very supportive for labor’s demands. When you look at the nurses strike, you saw every elected official out there supporting them, which is right — the city administration, state elected officials out there on the picket line, saying these health care professionals deserved fair wages and reasonable workloads.

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of how much pressure a strike brings, it is a little like apples to oranges. The customer in our case has to walk through a picket line to get to the product, which is a hotel room. In the hotel industry, you don’t necessarily need to go to a hotel that is struck, there are other options out there.

Are you an outlier among other unions in terms of getting their goals accomplished and building influence? 

We represent a vast majority of the workers in the industry. Having that high union density not only gives us bargaining power to win those contracts but allows us to sit across from management to ask for wage increases for our members, knowing it won’t put unionized operators at a competitive disadvantage to nonunion operators. We know there are so few nonunion operators out there in competition with us.

I go to sleep and wake up thinking about how we maximize our contracts, where room attendants can get paid a living wage, have free health care, and a pension that allows them to retire with dignity and respect.  

What makes this union different from others is our level of member engagement. The depth of it stands out. If you look at the amount of time and members who volunteer to support the union, it’s increasing exponentially year after year.

What’s your legislative agenda in Albany this year?

We’re not looking for anything in the state budget this cycle. We’re absolutely in support of the expansion toward universal child care. We think that is a great idea. We think both the city and state are making real progress. 

Thanks to changes in citywide zoning rules in 2021, hotel owners must obtain approval from the City Planning Commission to build a new property in commercial and manufacturing zones. According to CoStar, only three hotel projects have received a special permit, for 641 rooms, while there are four applications currently in the city’s zoning portal for a total of 174 rooms. Is the law, which your union supported, working as intended? 

New York City was the most overbuilt market anywhere in the country. The number of hotels being built was completely disproportionate with what the tourism industry could sustain. It was the Wild West. You saw all these projects going up that were never going to be successful. And buildings proposed to be hotels were going to other uses such as homeless shelters.

In 2021, when the special permits went into effect, the city required hotels go through the process that other construction projects go through and get prior approvals. 

After a few years, when hotels prior to 2021 have been topped off, you will see a much more reasonable growth rate. The new hotels will be better projects that accommodate tourism and make the industry much healthier. I suspect that’s something the hotel industry is thankful for.  

Do you think the permitting process is holding back projects in any way? 

It depends on the circumstances. What special permits do is make sure new projects are good for their communities. It has rightsized the pipeline of new hotels, ensuring that new hotels being developed are ones that make sense for the neighborhood. Special permits have been a real benefit not just to the industry and workers but the communities where these hotels are going to be built. 

Good projects that are thoughtful and benefit the communities and the economy will still get built.

What do you think about the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, which allowed for the conversion of nonresidential buildings? Do you think we will see more hotel conversions in the future? 

I don’t think I’ve seen the City of Yes spurring a race to convert hotels to residential properties. Depending on the market at any given time, you’ll see some hotels convert to residential, but I have not seen a race to convert hotels to residential. 

When the pandemic occurred, hotel workers were furloughed for many months. Are most of your members who want to stay in the hospitality industry back to work now? 

We don’t see the same membership that we had pre-pandemic. Part of that is because of retirement, and the rest were folks that weren’t replaced. By and large, hotels are operating at very high occupancy, and the vast majority of our members are working. 

Hotels are hiring and we’re able to find jobs for people in the hotel industry. There are always plenty of applicants looking to fill them. We’ve never had a problem finding folks to fill openings. In terms of expanding our membership, we’re always looking to organize existing nonunion hotels, and that’s something we’ll turn our focus back to [now that we finalized] the contract.

The HTC was also instrumental in convincing the City Council to curtail Airbnb’s ability to offer short-term rentals in New York City. Why did you want to limit their platform?

There’s finally a system in place where the city can regulate Airbnb to make sure people aren’t renting illegal and commercial hotels in residential buildings. For a New Yorker looking for a place to live, that’s one less unit on the market. 

Another pernicious effect of short-term rentals are when people are looking to buy a one- to two-family home. If they are looking to buy them as a residence, that’s great. But short-term rentals turn those residences into commercial properties, which increases the costs and becomes an investment property. The initial investment it takes goes way up, it incentivizes private equity to go buy up one- and two-family homes. Families just can’t compete with all the cash offers private equity can make.

Has the Airbnb ban been working so far?

Our plan there was fairly straightforward. It’s bad policy, it increases rents, it increases cost of entry for first-time homebuyers, and it’s a bad idea where the only beneficiary are these tech companies that exist on platforms that can make a profit off it. Otherwise the effect it has is uniformly negative on the people of New York. 

We will continue doing what we’re doing and partner with housing groups to ensure that the existing short-term regulations make sense.

Why did you endorse Zohran Mamdani immediately after the primary? What did you see in him?

It was our belief that he was going to be a mayor that really cares for working New Yorkers. He believes people should get a fair wage, he’s concerned about affordability issues, transportation, child care and housing. With our union in particular he has been out on rallies and picket lines, supporting our members fighting for fair contracts. We know he’s going to be an ally for labor and an ally for hotel workers. It was easy to support him.

What sort of response have you gotten from the Mamdani administration so far? 

We really haven’t asked them for anything in the past two months yet. Obviously, we’re in contact with the administration, but we haven’t had any particular asks, and we haven’t gotten into a fight.

Why did you decide to endorse Gov. Kathy Hochul and host her re-election kickoff?

She is a sitting governor and by all accounts doing a really good job. I don’t think she should have any trouble getting re-elected. We endorsed her the first time around. Even early on, she has proven she understands the issues she is facing, and comes up with solutions for them.

Unemployment insurance is a great example. We pointed out that the unemployment cap was unsustainably low and the working period for sustaining workers should be shortened. And she was able to make that happen in a way that made economic sense. By paying off the debt the insurance trust owed, she was able to reduce costs for employers so that the trust wasn’t in the red. She recognized that hotel workers, just by virtue of the industry, were out of work for far longer than any other profession, and she was able to help laid-off workers.

What does your endorsement process look like?

Our process generally involves, in the mayor’s race, a forum where all candidates have the ability to address our members. Then we talk with members and experts and try to pick the candidate who will best support our workers. Our endorsement tends to be fairly coveted. We have a membership that is politically sophisticated and very active and ready to volunteer and phone bank.

Do you have a favorite hotel? 

They’re all my favorite.

Where do you stay? Or where does your extended family stay when they visit?

I don’t stay in hotels. I have the joy of commuting. I come in from New Jersey. My family usually stays at my house. It depends what they’re looking for, how much they want to spend, but my family usually stays in my extra room.