Day: April 29, 2024

Who is Hope Hicks and how is she connected to Trump’s hush money case?  ABC News

new york — Unionized hotel workers demanding significant pay raises will rally on May Day in 18 U.S. and Canadian cities, as talks are beginning with hotel operators Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide Holdings and Hyatt Hotels Corp.

Talks will cover about 40,000 workers who look to secure new contracts for the first time since the pandemic. Workers want to reverse pandemic-era staffing and service cuts, as well as duplicate the big pay hikes that organized workers across the nation have been winning in recent years.

Demonstrators rallying for raises on May 1, the international workers’ holiday, may face some pressure in markets still recovering from the pandemic, such as San Francisco and Hawaii, analysts say.

“There have been a series of staffing and service cuts that have led to both painful working conditions for the workers and reduced services for the guests,” said Gwen Mills, international union president at Unite Here, which represents nearly 300,000 workers in hotels, casinos, food service, airports and other industries across the U.S. and Canada.

After domestic travel cratered during the pandemic, hotel operators hiked up room rates in the travel boom that followed. In response, workers are demanding a larger share of profits.

Workers will march through downtown Boston, Greenwich and several cities in California. Others in Baltimore, New Haven and Toronto will picket outside hotels. In Honolulu, workers will rally on the main thoroughfare in Waikiki.

2023 was a significant year for labor negotiations in the U.S. with manufacturing, auto and hospitality workers in Las Vegas among those who landed record contracts as a tight labor market allowed employees to flex more bargaining power.

The Culinary and Bartenders Unions in Las Vegas, Unite Here affiliates, said its workers got a 10% wage increase in the first year of its new five-year contract and a total 32% in raises, a record in its history.

This will be Unite Here’s first multi-city contract campaign since 2018, when about 7,000 Marriott workers went on strike in eight cities. The union secured substantial wage increases, affordable health care and protections against sexual harassment, including panic buttons for housekeepers.

Marriott said in 2018 that the renegotiated contract following the strike led to a roughly 4% rise in labor costs.

Negotiations have already started in Washington, D.C., Hawaii and Boston.

The union said negotiations will be held with each hotel to secure an individual contract.

The result of these negotiations could be far-reaching as “non-union hotels will likely also increase wages to attract and maintain employees,” said Emmy Hise, CoStar Senior Director of Hospitality Analytics.

“We look forward to negotiating fair contracts with Unite Here locals across the country that have expiring collective bargaining agreements this year,” said Michael D’Angelo, Hyatt head of labor relations in the Americas.

Marriott and Hilton did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bulk of negotiations are set to take place during the summer, the union said.

U.S. gross operating profit per room in 2023 increased 8.6% year-over-year and 0.5% compared to the same period in 2019, according to commercial real estate analytics firm CoStar.

Hotel staffing per occupied room is down 13% since 2019, the union said.

U.S. hotel revenue per available room, a key metric in the hospitality industry, in 2023 was the highest for any year on record at $97.97, which increased 4.9% from 2022, according to Costar.

Room revenue growth is expected to moderate to 4.1% in 2024. Hilton’s U.S. room revenue fell 0.4% during the first quarter.

In San Francisco, “profitability for hotel owners is still way off of 2019 levels, so hotel owners will be very reluctant to give an inch to the unions as they really can’t afford to do so,” said Patrick Scholes, Truist Equity Analyst.

The same may hold true for lodging Real Estate Investment Trusts, a growing share of hotel owners, who are concentrated in union markets and have operating margins that are under pressure due to higher costs.

It’s been almost two weeks since large-scale anti-Israel protests, beginning with an encampment at Columbia University, started spreading across American college campuses. Now, as mass arrests have been made at more than 20 colleges,it’s become clear that few university administrations have draped themselves in glory in response.

Their reactions to campus protests against Israel have veered from feckless to oppressive. Either protesters have been given too-free rein to shout eliminationist, antisemitic slogans and disrupt campus life, or they have been met with over-the-top paramilitary confrontations — which has only inspired more protests. 

Has any college president anywhere figured out a way to respond besides capitulation or chaos? 

At least one has. And — plot twist — he’s in Israel.

“I think what we’re seeing is that in many universities, they are reaping the fruits of their inactivity,” Daniel Chamovitz, president of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, said in a phone interview. 

Two years ago, in May 2022, Chamovitz, who heads a campus in Beer Sheva — just 25 miles from Israel’s border with Gaza — found himself at the center of a heated debate over a proposed pro-Palestinian protest. Palestinian-Israeli students on campus had declared their intention to commemorate the Nakba, the Arabic term for the events of 1948, in which Israel achieved statehood and 750,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes.  

At the same time, the group Im Tirtzu, which often takes stands against groups calling for coexistence and civil rights, declared its intention to hold a counterprotest. 

Chamovitz, a Pennsylvania-born plant geneticist who took over as the university’s president in 2019, made the fateful decision to engage the protesters before they protested. 

“I called the heads of the two groups together and said, ‘You both want to demonstrate at the same time, how are we going to make sure that this is a peaceful demonstration?’” said Chamovitz.  

Together with the dean of students, the groups worked out rules of engagement. They decided how far apart the two groups would remain, how many security personnel each group had to bring along to ensure their sides stayed orderly, how long they could each demonstrate, and “who would be screaming at what time, and what was allowed to be said and what was not allowed to be said.”

The groups signed off. The university closed the campus. Administrators knew, based on past experience, that outside agitators only make things more agitated. 

About 50 pro-Palestinian protesters showed up, waving Palestinian flags, singing Palestinian songs. About 300 counter-protesters demonstrated as well. 

“And when it was over they went back to class together,” said Hamowitz, “and we saw it as a huge success.”

Hamovitz, who wrote about the experience in a recent Times of Israel blog post, told me that success wasn’t the end of the story.

He didn’t anticipate that a political uproar would follow the event. But it did, provoked by social media posts and skewed media coverage.

Rightwing politicians called him a traitor for allowing the display of Palestinian flags. He pointed out they are legal under Israeli law. The mayor of Beersheba, who hadn’t been aware of the rallies, sent Hamovich a letter calling the Palestinian protest “a disgrace.” 

Later, a civil rights group had to defend one of the Arab protesters against charges brought by Im Tirtzu, who claimed that she broke the rules of engagement by using inciting language in her speech. Ultimately, the university, which investigated Im Tirtzu’s claim, chose to halt disciplinary action against her. 

Chamowitz’s defense against right wing political attacks was a simple one: He reiterated that a university’s mission is to facilitate an open exchange of ideas in a framework of mutual respect. That’s the same reasoning, by the way, that he used in creating the rules for the protesters themselves: You can’t learn and share opinions when any group feels threatened or unsafe

“I think the reason it worked at the university,” Chamovitz said, “is that we accept the fact that there are differences of opinion. We know we do not agree with each other. We also know we have to live together.”

That distinction seems lost on many American student protesters today. Ben Gurion University has 19,000 students, 13% of whom are Arab-Israeli. In 10 years, it has increased the number of Bedouin students tenfold, from 60 to 600.  The American college students calling to boycott Israeli universities — a common demand, alongside divesting from Israeli companies or American companies that do business with Israel — would be punishing some Palestinians, maybe just not the exact same ones they claim to be sleeping in the quad to help. 

From 10,000 miles aways, Chamovitz is reluctant to second-guess the decision of his American peers to call in police on students. But he does think that if university administrations began by clearly stating what their values, rules and expectations are, things might not get to the point where calling in the police seemed like the best, last resort. 

That doesn’t mean citing rules, but stressing values.

“Freedom of speech doesn’t give university presidents freedom from saying what they think,” Chamovitz said.

It’s not taking sides for a college president to tell students that calling for the annihilation of a country, as some protesters have, or using the tactics of nonviolence to defend or justify Hamas’s violence, contradicts the values of the university.  

Some American university presidents have done just that. In a letter to students, Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan College, said he would not eject students staging a camp-in, even though they were breaking campus rules, so long as they did not engage in violent or threatening behavior. “As long as we all reject violence, we have opportunities to listen and learn from one another.” 

More administrators, like Roth, need to make their values a red line, said Chamovitz. “It’s not just that some of the protesters are  antisemitic. It’s that the students are standing up for values that do not align whatsoever with what liberal higher education stands for.”

When a next wave of protests comes — and we all know it will —  Chamovitz’s advice to administrators is to act quickly, before things get out of control. Enter into a dialogue with students, and agree to rules of engagement. Be clear what’s permitted, and what isn’t, like, say, calling for death to all Zionists. Keep outside agitators out. Engage local politicians, and deploy your own social media to counter the inevitable bias and misinformation.

Before Oct. 7, Prof. Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, Ben Gurion University’s director of diversity, equality and inclusion, who is Bedouin, took two Arab and two Jewish Israeli students to American campuses to talk about shared society and how to have dialogue with people you disagree with. 

“The university campus is the first place where Arabs and Jews actually meet in a daily, equal way,” Abu-Rabia-Queder said during an August 2023 visit to San Francisco. “It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s important that you can express it in a safe space, but also in a way that will not threaten others.” 

Chamovitz told me the university is beginning to get new requests from American colleges to have Abu-Rabia-Queder, along with Arab and Jewish students come speak. It can’t happen soon enough.

The post Which elite university figured out how to handle anti-Israel protests? Hint: It’s in Israel appeared first on The Forward.

Donald Trump got a day off from his criminal trial due to court scheduling. He’s been whining about not getting to do enough campaigning because of his trial. But instead of taking advantage of his off day to do something productive, Trump sat home and went of the deep end.

Our friends at MeidasTouch posted a great summary of just how far off the unhinged deep end Trump went today:

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Ben is right, there needs to be more focus on this. Donald Trump’s worsening mental incompetence, from his insanity to his senility, is the story right now – and it’s not getting enough media coverage.

The post Donald Trump spends his off day going completely off the unhinged deep end appeared first on Palmer Report.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump is planning to campaign in the Midwest state of Michigan this week. It’s one of a handful of states that could swing the results of November’s presidential election. VOA Correspondent Scott Stearns has our story.

1. Former NSA worker gets nearly 22 years in prison for selling secrets to undercover FBI agent  The Hill
2. Former NSA worker gets nearly 22 years in prison for selling secrets to undercover FBI agent  The Washington Post
3. Former NSA worker gets nearly 22 years in prison for selling secrets to undercover FBI agent  KELOLAND.com

FBI increases reward in Lake Oconee murders of elderly couple to $25,000  Atlanta News First

Former NSA worker gets nearly 22 years in prison for selling secrets to undercover FBI agent  News-Press Now

2 more sentenced in carjacking, kidnapping of FBI employee in South Dakota  Fox News