Anaheim : Picketing to Continue at Disneyland Hotel

Unable to reach a settlement, 16 maintenance and landscape workers expect to continue picketing against the Disneyland Hotel through the weekend, a union official said Friday.

Joe Lara, of the 5,000-member Laborers and Hod Carriers Union Local 652, said other local members would join the strikers in eight-hour shifts on the picket line this weekend. The picket lines, set up at the hotel at 1150 W. Cerritos Ave., caused two labor and management organizations to cancel a conference at the hotel Thursday.

A week ago, the hotel settled another dispute with 132 administrative workers, said Commissioner Leonard Farrell of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The workers accepted a two-year wage freeze with the condition they receive a raise in their third year, Farrell said Friday.

Lara said that the landscapers also would accept a wage freeze but not a proposed contract clause that would allow management to subcontract some of the work. The clause, he said, “would cancel each and every one’s job.”

“All he (the hotel representative) has to do is drop the subcontract clause” and the employees would return to work, Lara said. The maximum salary a landscaper earns at the Disneyland Hotel, owned by the Beverly Hills-based Wrather Corp., is $9.71 per hour, Lara said. In the meantime, the hotel has hired temporary personnel to tend to its 67 acres, a hotel official said.

On Thursday, a seminar co-sponsored by the Orange County Industrial Relations Research Assn. and the National Labor Relations Board was canceled when many of the 400 participants refused to either cross the picket line or remain in the hotel with a picket outside.