Assuming she has outside advisers advising her, Penny Pritzker and her union-busting ways is exactly the type of individual Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will be targeting when the Department of Labor pushes through its new rules targeting “anti-union” employers.
In fact, it is rather odd that Ms. Pritzker’s anti-unionism hasn’t had a light shined on it by the union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board. Perhaps Craig Becker and his union cronies on the Obama board are just too busy haranguing Boeing and a myriad of other job creators for them to notice. Then again, perhaps Ms. Pritzker’s friendships with the Obama administration give her special consideration.
Pritzker, with a net worth of $1.1 billion and #204 on the 2009 list of Forbes 400 Richest Americans, according to her website, is the Chairman of the board of TransUnion, Chairman/CEO of Pritzker Realty Group, and Chairman and co-founder of Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt), The Parking Spot and Artemis Real Estate Partners. She also serves on the board of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and is a past board member of the Wrigley Company, Marmon Group and LaSalle Bank Corporation. She was also, at one time, considered to be a contender for Obama’s Commerce Secretary.
Now, Pritzsker serves on the President’s Council for Jobs and Competitiveness which advises the Obama Administration on economic growth and job creation, as well as Rahm Emmanuel’s Chicago Board of Education.
Given her devotion to the progressive ideals of the President she helped put in office, it is rather odd that she should be accused of dumping Hyatt housekeepers and replacing them with minimum wage temps. Or, for that matter, even more odd that Ms. Pritzker would give her blessing to having heat lamps turned on strikers in Chicago.
According to blogger Mike Klonsky, when faced with a one-day strike, Pritzkers’ Hyatt opted to put turn the heat on the union and its sympathizers:
It was already approaching 100° at 8 a.m. when I arrived at the Park Hyatt where, after 22 months of stalled negotiations, hotel workers were staging a one-day picket to protest the hotel chain’s intolerable treatment of their housekeeping staff.
In case you didn’t know, Hyatt is owned by the Pritzker family. Heiress Penny Sue Pritzker chairs Obama’s national campaign finance committee. She is also big player in Democratic Party politics as well as in the world of anti-union, corporate school reform and was recently appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to a seat on the Chicago school board.
Pritzker’s response to the Park Hyatt strikers was to turn on the hotel’s powerful heating lamps to try and bake the workers into submission on this brutally hot day.
Ouch!
According to a local CBS affiliate, the lights were turned off when the press showed up.
Combined with the outdoor air temperature, Linda Long says it was hotter than the Hyatt kitchen she’s worked in for eleven years.
“They put the heat lamps on us, like we were nothing,” Long said. “If the heat didn’t kill us, the heat lamps would.”
The heat lamps were turned off when the press showed up.
It certainly seems like this would be the type of retaliation against workers exercising their rights that Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon would be prosecuting with as much zeal as he is the executives at Boeing.
Thank goodness for Hilda Solis at the Department of Labor and the union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board are onto this union-busting scofflaw! Surely, Ms Pritzker and her corporate minions will be brought to justice with the fervor of…
Oh wait.
Apparently, Ms. Pritzker is also helping shore up Obama’s 2012 Jewish donors who may be upset over the administration’s abandonment of Israel.
Sorry unions, it looks like you’re just going to have to sweat it out some more.
UPDATE: Pritzker’s Park Hyatt Apologizes For Trying To Cook Strikers
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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
Photo Credit: The Exiled.
