To the Editor:

What was Hyatt thinking in firing the housekeepers? What's more important, the bottom line or the moral line?

Al Haimowitz



To the Editor:

How can the student assignment process be continuing as scheduled when it was to have been in place for the present 2009-2010 school year?

The SF Board of Education says it wants diversity, but how does it intend to send poor kids across town without adequate busing? Forced marches? And who would want to send their kid across town? A few maybe.

The community meetings are only a facade put forth to create the impression of collaboration. Expect more lotto style rolling of the dice and shuffling of the deck until we have leaders who want to teach rather than play musical chairs. Our leaders want to revert to the mean, statistically speaking. What a game for dullards.

Sylvan Brillian
San Francisco



To the Editor:

President Mike Casey with his already hoarse voice, was unabated chanting on the bull horn late at night spurring us on the picket line to continue till midnight, the coda of the three-day strategic strike. The Palace Hotel, by its location next to the Academy of Art is an excellent target for our strike.

Many youth from the Academy were mesmerized by the picket. Some joined the picket line momentarily, others filmed the event intently. We exchanged some discussions about the notion of the Union and they took notice. The picket was a double lesson to the greedy hotel and to the youth who were encountering a Union in action for the first time.

Alas with this age of electronics that is to the advantage of the corporate world many guests book their hotels in advance, and they would not have booked the Palace had they known about the strike. Given the economic realities of people, they would rather cross the picket line than search for another hotel or go through the bureaucratic headache of getting a refund.

Sometimes, you can't find another hotel. So here it is a delicate line for the Union. When we declare a strategic strike impromptu, we need to be sensitive to the guests who are sympathetic to our cause but who have no other way to avoid crossing the picket line, like a guest from France who didn't know that the hotel was on strike, but he impossibly had no way to maneuver given his budget.

Those who show arrogance we must shower them with "Don't check in, check out", "Scum bags", etc. It would be an ideal situation if the Union could find a way to divulge which hotels are on strike at the international level. This is said, we must not genuflect for any situation once the Rubicon is crossed. Once the picket line is on the move war is declared, and we should spare no weapons in our
store.

A guest was mad, she approached me to tell me that we are so disrespectful for making her three day stay hellish. She said that the scabs stole some of her belonging. She blamed us for it. Alas, it is easy for her to blame the Union since we are visible, but not the invisible malice of the corporate world, e.g. the Palace.

Adam Smith knew well the difficult road ahead of the Union. He said that when the workers combine to ask for their rights they have no other means but to be raucous, while the bosses combine in secret chambers to do their deeds. The former are visible to the masses, the latter are hidden.

Naffis Griffis
San Francisco



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