Socially conscious students gathered on the steps of the Main Building Thursday afternoon to deliver a personal letter to University President Fr. John Jenkins demanding that the University divest its funds from HEI Hotels and Resorts...

Workers from the HEI-owned Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine announced August 31, 2010, they are calling for a boycott of their employer. Other boycotted HEI properties include the Hilton Long Beach, Sheraton Crystal City and Le Meridien in San Francisco. Under boycott, workers request that potential customers not eat, sleep or meet at the HEI-owned hotels.

Elizabeth Martinez has worked at the Hilton in Long Beach, Calif., for 11 years. She said her job used to be "really a pleasure," but when HEI Hotels and Resorts bought the hotel four years ago, they laid off many workers and stretched the remaining staff thin. Now workers scramble to complete the work of multiple people, she said, sometimes working unpaid during their lunch breaks so they can finish on time. "I'm working by myself a lot of times," said Martinez, who waits tables at the hotel restaurant for minimum wage. "I'm basically running to get the job done."

A $200 million resort hotel does not exactly resemble a suburban home. But scratch the surface of the sales market for each property category, and they look remarkably similar today...

The union representing most hotel workers in San Francisco is attempting to put economic pressure on two non-union hotels that have not agreed to accommodate an organizing effort.

In economic and business classes across campus, students learn about labor as an abstraction, as a commodity, as something to be traded on the market. But for Peter Ho and three other hotel workers who spoke last week with a group of students, faculty and staff, labor is deeply personal.

HEI Hotels and Resorts agreed to return fired Union leader Ferdi Lazo to work at the Sheraton Crystal City hotel.

The sit-in held by Yale’s Undergraduate Organizing Committee last month was just one of a dozen nationwide efforts to protest university investments in a hotel company. But all of the campaigns, though led by students, originated from the same place: a union, UNITE HERE...