TPG – RI Future

November 19, 2015November 19, 2015

City Council committee passes tax break for hotel at choreographed meeting

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Some of the business suits worn in the Providence City Council Finance Committee meeting last night were worth more than a hotel worker’s monthly salary.

The power and pressure being brought to bear, to make sure that The Procaccianti Group (TPG) got their multi-million dollar Tax Stabilization Agreement (TSA) was enough to bend reality, as a five member committee was whittled down to three members and the final vote unanimous in favor of TPG.

City Hall was electric with meetings being conducted behind closed doors. What happened in the Finance Committee room was theater, the real deals were all made out of sight. The Finance Committee meeting seemed meticulously planned so that when it started, it would fall like a string of dominoes in favor of moneyed interests and to the detriment of hotel workers.

At issue was a 13-year TSA for the Fogarty Building site downtown, where TPG wants to build a new nine-story hotel. The building trade unions want the hotel, it will provide a couple years worth of good jobs. The hotel workers want the hotel and the jobs it will provide as well, but they wanted an amendment to the TSA “calling for workers to earn 1 1/2 times the federal poverty rate, or more than $14 an hour.”

Good wages for hotel workers are important. TPG is notorious for paying poorly, and the company requires their workers to do much more than workers at competing downtown hotels. Then there’s the steady stream of injuries to workers in TPG hotels. Unionization efforts at the Renaissance Hotel have dragged on for years and only recently did the hotel win a vote to unionize. Without the amendment, a new hotel full of underpaid, overworked and at-risk workers will be coming on-line even as Renaissance workers finally realize a fair contract.

On one side of the Finance Committee meeting room was Mayor Elorza’s Chief Operating officer, Brett Smiley, RI AFL-CIO leader George Nee, Michael Sabitoni, business manager for the RI Laborers’ District Council, state senator Josh Miller, a pile of lawyers and TPG reps, and prominent members of the Providence business community. Council President Luis Aponte stood nearby and monitored the proceedings.

Hotel workers and Unite Here! organizers, vastly outnumbered and outgunned, sat opposite.

Finance Committee Chair John Igliozzi was the city councilor who once suggested tying TSA’s to better wages way back in June, 2014. When it came time to amend the TSA, however, he was silent. Councilors Kevin Jackson and Sabina Matos were also silent, save to deliver the lines required to vote the TSA to the full City Council for final approval next month.

Missing from the committee meeting was Councilor Terrance Hassett, whose day job is Senior Investigator in the Workers’ Compensation Fraud and Compliance Unit at the Department of Labor and Training. He, like two other members of the finance committee, works for the state. It is well known that Governor Gina Raimondo wants this project to proceed. On background I was told that city council members were afraid of losing their jobs if they interfered with the deal, but nobody wanted to go on record.

(Given this, Providence voters might want to reconsider electing council members with state jobs.)

Hassett was a no show, but Councillor Carmen Castillo, a hotel worker herself, was there. She put her purse and coat down into her chair, then left the room to talk off stage with someone. While she was out of the room the Finance Committee meeting started and attendance was called. She was marked absent.

As the meeting got underway Castillo entered the room, recovered her purse and coat, and left without explanation.

There were three members left of the five member committee, enough for a quorum. As hotel workers looked on, the TSA was passed out of committee without the amendment they had requested. Millions of dollars in tax breaks were given to TPG.

There were smiles and handshakes all around as one half of the room erupted in enthusiastic conversation. Finance chair Igliozzi pounded his gavel for order, there was still the city’s contract with Local 1033 to be decided, so $40,000 worth of fine business suits moved outside and into the hallways, and eventually outside into the street.

The hotel workers gathered in a corner on the third floor so that a translator could explain to some of the Spanish speaking members what had happened.

But they understood.

This was government as business and business as usual.

September 18, 2015September 18, 2015

The Procaccianti Group still grinding employees for profit

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Hotel workers at the Providence Hilton and Renaissance hotels in downtown Providence are still working without a contract, and are still experiencing work-related injury and illness at rates 69% higher at the Hilton and 85% higher at the Renaissance Hotel than the national average.

Last night workers rallied at the Providence City Hall entrance used by Providence City Council members to let them know that The Procaccianti Group (TPG), the company that runs both hotels, is literally grinding profits out of the long term health of their employees.

People work so that they can maintain their health and lives, not so that those lives can be used up by greedy corporations that value profit over people. What TPG is doing is deeply immoral, which is why the boycott of all TPG hotels is so important. The utter disregard displayed by the Rhode Island General Assembly towards the plight of these workers and their rights has been sickening, and a stain upon our state.

Mike Araujo, on his way to receive his Progressive Hero award from the RI Progressive Democrats of America for his work with the Restaurant Opportunities Center and the One Fair Wage Coalition, stopped by the hotel workers’ protest to lend his support.

July 25, 2015

How a hotel developer divided organized labor in Rhode Island

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Michael Sabitoni, business manager for the RI Laborers’ District Council, was perhaps a bit misleading when he rhetorically asked RI NPR reporter Ian Donnis, “Why pick on this one — we didn’t even build yet — when I got 50 percent unemployment in the Building Trades?”

Sabitoni was referring to Unite Here Local 217’s efforts to delay the construction of a proposed hotel on Fountain Street. Building a new hotel would provide much needed jobs to the building trades. The proposed hotel is to be paid for and built by The Procaccianti Group (TPG), a company that runs two hotels in downtown Providence: the Renaissance and the Hilton.

Unite Here Local 217 has been in a fight with TPG for a union, fair wages and a contract for over three years. These two hotels pay the lowest wages, demand the most work, and treat employees worse than any other hotels in Providence.

In short, TPG’s treatment of labor in Providence has been nothing short of disgraceful, and at times has been monstrous.

Short of a strike, one of the most powerful weapon a union has is a boycott. Unite Here Local 217 has called for a boycott of TPG hotels until such a time as TPG begins to sit down and work out a contract with hotel workers that ensures decent wages, decent working conditions and respect.

Geroge Nee, president of the RI AFL-CIO, knows the power of boycotts. In a story Nee tells often, he famously came to Rhode Island in 1971 to help organize a successful lettuce boycott for the United Farm Workers of America.

Boycotts are difficult to enforce. With a boycott you’re asking all those in support of workers to change their buying habits. Sometimes you’re even asking workers, businesses and supporters to suffer economic privation as they avoid purchasing needed commodities.

Boycotts depend on worker solidarity.

Union busters know that strikes and boycotts can be broken as soon as workers become hungry enough. Tactics include waiting out the workers, or playing one set of workers against another. Few people are going to honor a boycott when their kids can’t be fed and their mortgage can’t be paid.

When Sabitoni said to WPRI‘s Dan McGowan, “We cannot wait any longer. We need jobs and we need them now,” he was basically admitting that for his people, the boycott is over. They were too hungry to wait anymore.

Solidarity, like a chain, is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

[I reached out to Nee and Sabotoni for comment, and haven’t heard back from either of them yet, but this post will be updated if they chose to respond.]

May 4, 2015May 5, 2015

Students, faculty accuse PC of racial profiling and anti-unionism

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The Providence College Coalition Against Racism held a press conference, followed by a march through the Providence College (PC) campus, “to protest the ongoing racial profiling on campus and the failure of the college administration to stop doing business with the Renaissance Hotel.”

Dr. Julia Jordan-Zachary has been a professor at Providence College for seven years and has been stopped by campus security eight times. She is the director of PC’s Black Studies Program and has recently been promoted to full professor. PC has a policy prohibiting racial profiling.

The Coalition maintains that the PC director of Safety and security, Jack Leyden, is not enforcing this policy.

“Some try to discredit our experiences with claims such as ‘It must be how they are dressed,’” said Jordan-Zachary, “and I always want to say, ‘I survived 18 years as a black female academic. I think I know how to dress.’”

“I do everything conceivably possible not to draw the attention of security guards on this campus,” said Jordan-Zachary, such as “trying to figure out how to walk through buildings so that I am almost invisible,” and selecting classrooms to teach in that are as close as possible to her office to avoid long walks on campus.

Student Bini Tsegaye, a graduating senior, also spoke about the systemic racism and profiling on the PC campus. “For four years straight I’ve been stopped and questioned by security and safety officers, and most of the time they drive around in their van to see if I belonged on campus.”

Tsegaye got a job on campus, thinking that “being a student employee would decrease the constant interrogation and profiling, since security officers would be working with me. But that’s not the reality I saw on my job.”

In addition to calling for an end to racial profiling on campus, Professor Cedric de Leon called upon PC to stop recommending the Providence Renaissance Hotel for college events because of “the owners’ failure to respond in a legal manner to workers’ efforts to organize a union.” The Renaissance and the Providence Hilton, both located downtown, are managed by The Procaccianti Group (TPG).

When PC students and faculty approached the college about boycotting the Renaissance, they were told that there was “no compelling interest for Providence College to advise the families of our students and our alumni to avoid using the hotel.”

Professor de Leon disagrees. Providence College is a Catholic school. “This inaction,” says de Leon, “is a violation of Catholic social thought, and is due to the fact that those whose rights are being violated are by and large people of color and therefore of little social importance either to the PC administration or to TPG.”

“The fact that PC insists on using anti-union hotels, despite the many other hotels in Providence,” said De Leon, “suggests that a strong personal connection between PC and TPG is preventing the administration from doing what is right.”

Two hotel workers, Santa Brito from the Renaissance and Jonah Zinn from the Hilton, spoke about working conditions at the hotels and the impossibility of negotiating with TPG.

Brito, who is currently not working due to health problems she received on the job, recalled being pregnant, and “at the moment I went to give birth [TPG] tried to fire me.”

“We are also fighting against racism in the hotel,” said Brito. “We are living day to day with the racism in this hotel and we need to stop it now.”

“One of my co-workers,” said Zinn, “the hotel tried to fire her two weeks after she gave birth to twins. While she was pregnant the hotel refused to reduce” the number of rooms she needed to clean in a shift.

The Coalition presented four demands.

“That the College fire the Director of Safety and Security due to his failure to enforce PC’s policy against racial profiling.”
“That the College discipline the security officer who profiled the director of the College’s Black Studies Program.”
“That the College begin full enforcement of their policy against racial profiling.”
“That the College refrain from doing business with the Renaissance Hotel until management grants the workers a fair process to decide on unionization.”

After the press conference, de Leon led a march through the campus. After the march students and faculty stepped forward to describe the ways they were made to feel uncomfortable or even endangered on campus by PC security or fellow students. de leon finally led those still in attendance to sing “We Shall Overcome.”

Listening to those speaking out, its clear PC has a lot to overcome before being known as a welcoming, inclusive campus, able to live up to its Catholic ideals.

May 4, 2015May 4, 2015

Early morning picket disturbs Renaissance Hotel patrons

Hotel workers carried signs, beat drums and chanted outside the Providence Renaissance Hotel at 7am Saturday morning. The Renaissance Providence Hotel has been resisting efforts by its staff to form a union to negotiate for better wages and humane working conditions.

The protest was held early because many of the hotel workers involved had to be at work by 8am. The protest was not appreciated by the hotel, and after a few minutes the Providence police arrived. However, once the police realized that the noise ordinance was not being violated, they informed hotel management that workers have a right to picket, and the protest continued for a full hour.

Hotel guests were not appreciative. Two women, hotel patrons, identified themselves as school teachers and union members. They called the picketers actions “rude” and “too much.” It is unknown if the women had any knowledge about the health-breaking and low-paying working conditions at the luxury hotel they were staying in.

Both the Renaissance and the Providence Hilton are managed by The Procaccianti Group (TPG), and conditions for workers at both hotels are measurably worse than at other area hotels. Room cleaners are expected to clean many more rooms for much less money at TPG run hotels. The work TPG forces upon their employees is exhausting, and it is costing hotel workers their health, say organizers.

The workers are being helped in their organizing by Unite Here 217.

April 30, 2015April 30, 2015

Unite Here Local 217 launches anti-Procaccianti website

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Unite Here Local 217 has taken the battle to unionize workers at two Providence hotels to another level with the unveiling of a new website, TPG Fails, extremely critical of The Procaccianti Group, (TGP) a “Cranston-based hotel developer and management company.”

Unite Here local 217 has been engaged in a unionization effort at the Providence Renaissance Hotel and Hilton Providence for several years. Both hotels are managed by The Procaccianti Group, who have been relentless in fighting the efforts of employees to receive fair wages and decent treatment.

Subtitled “an independent investor information website posted by Unite Here,” TPG Fails is a compendium of the company’s bad investments, environmental disasters and “wasted opportunities.”

For instance, under “Hotel Failures” the site lists three hotels TPG managed to lose millions of dollars on, resulting in delinquent loan repayments and multi-million dollar defaults.

Under “Costly Cleanups” we learn that “In 2008, The Procaccianti Group discharged its deed of 138 Hamlet Ave. in Woonsocket, RI. The site was built in the early 1900s and was primarily used as a textile manufacturing plant. The Procaccianti Group subsidiary FDS Industries, which stored office and hotel equipment, abandoned the site in 2001. The environmental concerns at this site include a variety of contaminants, including Volatile Organic Compounds, Semi volatile Organic Compounds, Metals, including Hexavalent Chromium, Pesticides, Herbicides, Polychlorinated Biphenyl, Lead, Asbestos, Fluorescent light ballasts, and other solid wastes.” In 2008 Woonsocket was granted $200,000 in EPA funds to clean up the site.

The new website paints an especially grim picture of TPG’s environmental record. “In 2011, the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council told Procaccianti subsidiary PBH Realty that it was in violation of six state freshwater wetland laws because of a man made pond PBH had made on a Jamestown property. Chris Powell, who was chairman of the Conservation Commission, said, ‘I chaired the commission for 27 years and these are the most blatant and obvious violations I have ever seen.’ Press accounts [here] and [here] state that after two years, the Coastal Resources Management Council accepted a ‘compromise’ restoration order.”

Wasted opportunities include the boarded up Fogarty Building downtown, and a promised 22 story high rise, “Empire at Broadway” that is today a parking lot.

Every excruciating TPG embarrassment is sourced.

The goal of this website is to pressure TPG to negotiate with the hotel workers in good faith. “UNITE HERE Local 217 is in ongoing labor disputes with two Procaccianti Group hotels in Providence, RI,” says their press release, “Fund managers should do their due diligence before partnering with The Procaccianti Group.”