Workers at Hilton’s Buena Vista Palace hotel have passed a new union contract that will give them more job protections and immediate pay raises. The agreement comes after about a year of contract talks and several rallies to make workers’ demands known.
A hospitality union in Central Florida called UNITE HERE Local 737 shared the news of the new deal on social media Thursday. The union represents 19,000 service and hospitality workers. Over 300 people who work at the Hilton Buena Vista Palace near Disney Springs and the Hilton-owned DoubleTree Universal near the Universal Orlando park are part of the union. They do things like cleaning, serving food, working as bartenders, and more.
The most recent four-year union deal for hotel workers ended on December 31, 2024. Hilton is a global hospitality business worth billions of dollars. However, the union and Hilton were unable to come to an agreement on important issues such as pay rates, retirement benefits, and healthcare costs before the contract expired.
A lot of workers complained that Hilton’s pay rates were not even close to those at Disney-owned hotels, where workers are also unionized with UNITE HERE. In their old union deal, housekeepers at Hilton Buena Vista Palace made $16 an hour, while those at Disney World resort hotels that were unionized made $22 an hour.
Amanda Garcia, a food service worker at the hotel, told Orlando Weekly, “The pay is very low right now compared to what you’d get at other restaurants or just quick service places in this area.” She said, “We’re about $5 less than other hotels, even the Hilton across the street.”
Local 737 says that workers under the new union contract will get “huge” pay raises, lower medical costs through their insurance plan, a new dental plan that is mostly paid for by the employer for the first time, less work for housekeepers (because higher workloads put them at a higher risk of overwork and injury), and 20% tips added automatically to all guest checks for servers and bartenders at the hotel’s Shades and Sunnies restaurants.
A union representative confirmed that the minimum wage for housekeepers will go up from $16 an hour to $21 an hour right away. It will hit $24 an hour by June 2028. The lowest-paying jobs at the hotel will see their pay go from $14.50 an hour to $17 an hour right away. In June 2028, the minimum wage will rise to $20. The union rep said that some workers will get an extra $10 an hour during that time.
97 percent of union members who voted agreed to the terms of the deal.
Protecting workers who are immigrants
The new union deal for immigrant workers at Hilton, according to the union, gives them more job protections, which is even more timely. Many immigrants come to the U.S. to work in the hospitality business, along with the agriculture and construction industries.
Many of the immigrants who work in the tourism business in Central Florida have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and come from countries like Haiti. The Trump administration is now threatening to deport these workers. Another labor group that works for Haitian TPS holders, 32BJ SEIU, has joined a lawsuit against the government for removing TPS status from more than 200,000 Haitian immigrants.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says that TPS is a temporary immigration status program that helps people from other countries who are suffering from an ongoing armed war, an environmental disaster, or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions.” With TPS, people can get work permits and are temporarily not deported.
Lawyer and TPS holder Gerald Michaud said, “I filed this lawsuit not only for myself and my wife, but for hundreds of thousands of my fellow Haitians here on TPS whose lives would be turned upside down.” After a terrible earthquake in his home country in 2010, Michaud was given TPS protection.
A recent idea was put forward to exempt certain TPS and undocumented workers from deportation efforts in the hotel, restaurant, and farming industries. However, the Trump administration quickly dropped the idea, and federal officials were divided on it.
The new contract at Hilton Buena Vista Palace has text that makes sure no immigrant worker loses their job without first having the chance to fix any paperwork problems, go to immigration court, or appeal their status. It also says that if an employee quits because they lost their work permit, they can come back to work at the hotel within two years as long as they can show proof that they have their work permit again.
According to the deal, union members will get a paid day off for becoming U.S. citizens. Other guarantees include the right to unpaid days off for immigration procedures, the right to language help in grievance meetings, and the right to talk to each other in the language of their choice.
It took a long time
Local hotel workers began contract talks with Hilton last year. Their goals were to get a higher minimum wage, less work for housekeepers, a good pension plan that lets older workers retire with honor, cheaper health insurance, and to stop what they call an unfair plan to replace full-time union jobs with temporary non-union jobs. Workers said this happened more often since the COVID-19 spread, leaving in-house staff to train new employees all the time (without extra pay, of course).
As per Local 737, the new union contract at Hilton Buena Vista Palace also protects against this, making sure that there are more union-covered jobs and fewer temporary jobs to fill the gaps.
As contract talks dragged on for a year without making enough progress, the union held a number of rallies near the hotel to bring attention to their cause and stress how important it is to raise standards for all hospitality workers in the region and industry.
Other unions, like the American Federation of Government Employees and the United Auto Workers, joined them at times. So did Central Florida Jobs with Justice and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, who held a conference at Buena Vista Palace last month and joined the workers’ rally to show their support.
Hilton Hotels, which is based in McLean, Virginia, did not reply right away to a request for comment on the new CBA at their hotel next to Disney. Between its 24 global hotel brands, Hilton owns more than 8,600 properties in 139 countries and regions. Besides Florida, a number of Hilton-owned hotels in the U.S. are also organized.
