Fry The Bastards!, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #233

July 25, 2011 Mike Gold 0 Comments

It was only 83 degrees at 7:00 AM in Chicago last Thursday, so, what the hell, turn the heat lamps on your striking workers. Maybe they’ll get the point.

The Park Hyatt Chicago Hotel is in the heart of the city’s gold coast, a.k.a. the Miracle Mile. It is across the street from the famous Water Tower, an ornate building that survived the Great Fire of 1871. Of course, everything inside the Water Tower melted and more people died from dehydration and other water related issues than from the fire itself.

After 22 months of stalled negotiations, these Park Hyatt workers went out on strike to protest the conditions of housekeepers; other actions have been occurring at various Hyatt hotels across the nation. There are 10 heat lamps that hang over the hotel sidewalk where the strikers were lawfully picketing, and some manager decided it would be a really cool idea to turn them on.

Had he not been stopped an hour later, we don’t know how long this would have gone on. The eastern two-thirds of the nation has been in the grips of the worst heat wave in more than a half-century, and last Thursday Chicago was in its path. Whereas summer temperatures along Lake Michigan generally are lower in the summer than the “official” readings taken at O’Hare International, turning on the heat lamps in such extremely high temperatures meets my definition of attempted murder. A plea deal might knock that down to attempted manslaughter.

The Hyatt ownership apologized Friday morning. “Hyatt regrets the events that occurred at the Park Hyatt Chicago and apologizes to everyone who was impacted by them,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “After looking into the incident, we have determined that the decision to turn on the heaters was made by a manager.  It was clearly a decision that was not in line with our values or with our corporate policies. We have a long history of respecting our associates’ rights and caring about their well-being and this unacceptable behavior is certainly is not illustrative of that history.” The Trib characterized the decision to turn on the heat lamps as a “controversial move.” It’s nice to see that even in these bad times for the Tribune Company and another round of massive lay-offs, they can still maintain their sense of irony.

The funny thing is, my gut-level reaction is to believe Hyatt’s statement. This may come as a surprise, but the Pritzker family founded and owns the Hyatt chain and their foundation has funded an enormous number of worthy programs – health, scholastic, all kinds of good things. J.B. Pritzker was national co-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The family puts their money where their mouth is, and in full disclosure I note I had raised quite a bit of money from these folks.

However, I have yet to hear about this manager getting fired. If it has yet to happen, it probably will – Hyatt will need to get rid of him in order to save face and provide groundcover for possible lawsuits and inevitable complaints to the National Labor Relations Board.

Whereas I regard myself as highly pro-labor, I am not an absolutist. I believe the unions need to pull themselves into the 21st Century, and some of the tactics and most of the attitude from the turn of the last century are no longer applicable. However, given the Republican and Tea Bagger onslaught against collective bargaining and big business’s traditional hostility against unions, dialectics will help maintain labor’s outdated strategies.

But this bastard who turned on the heat lamps should be in a different job. Perhaps working in the laundry room at the famed charm school in Joliet.

Anarcho-Activist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold will resume performing his weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com as soon as he recovers from outpatient back surgery. When that happens, his Weird Sounds show will be available on-demand.

The author thanks the late Steve Goodman for the “charm school in Joliet” reference from his great song Lincoln Park Pirates.