Rob O’Brien — nothing like having a fast blog trigger finger (yes, AAAUnite is a blog devoted to the whole mess) — has been working mightily to organize AAA members, including the possibility of a counter-conference. Check out his letter to the AAA President, which just about perfectly encapsulates what I hope are many of the association members’ sentiments.

The AAA Executive Board’s decision to move the conference to Atlanta just plain stinks (and yes, before anyone writes in, I have no idea what it takes or costs to run a big non-profit organization). For logistical reasons alone, the decision is incredibly impractical; at least San Jose was in the same time zone as San Francisco. (The date is also when universities start going on winter break, or plunge students into finals week.) A good number of academics (and certainly graduate students) cannot easily afford to change plans so drastically.

Most important, as I’ve already written, the decision is terrible in principle; it results in hardly any benefit to the union. The only real winner here is the Hilton group, and AAA’s rank capitulation to them makes me ashamed — a nice gob of spit in the face of the 4,000 locked-out employees.

I’ve just sent a letter to my department chair at SF State, hoping that there might be a chance — though it might be a logistical impossibility — that a counter-conference could be hastily arranged here. We’re close enough to downtown, after all — closer than San Jose or Atlanta — and I’m betting that there would be a good amount of angry anthropologists with non-refundable tickets who would want to participate. I can’t think of a better opportunity to discuss — and demonstrate — the relationship between the academy and local communities, or the anthropologist’s ethical responsibilities.

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I’m a little stunned:

October 22, 2004

MEMORANDUM

To: AAA members
From: Liz Brumfiel, AAA President, and the AAA Executive Board
Subject: The 2004 Annual Meeting

In a teleconference held on October 21, 2004, the AAA Executive Board voted to move the 2004 Annual Meeting from the San Francisco Hilton on November 17-21 to the Atlanta Hilton, December 15-19, 2004, a change in both venue and date.

Many of you are already aware that the San Francisco Hilton Hotel and thirteen other hotels in San Francisco are in a labor contract standoff with Local 2 of UNITE/HERE, the union representing cooks, dishwashers, bellmen, servers, room cleaners and switchboard operators. Union members struck the hotels several weeks ago and were subsequently locked out. Picket lines are posted at the entrances to the Hilton, and it appears likely that contract negotiations between the union and the multi-employer group representing the 14 hotels will not be settled by November 17, the time originally scheduled for the AAA’s Annual Meeting.

On October 18, AAA’s Executive Board held a teleconference meeting in order to consider potential responses to the lockout situation. These included moving our function space from the Hilton to other locations in San Francisco and moving the meeting to other cities, including Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland, Philadelphia and San Jose. On October 19-20, the Board conducted a poll in which AAA members who had pre-registered for the meeting were asked to express their preference for what, at the time, seemed to be the three most likely possibilities for the meeting: staying at the San Francisco Hilton, moving the meeting to San Jose, or canceling the meeting all together. A summary of the poll results is provided in the table below.

Two factors weighed heavily in the Board’s subsequent decision. The first factor was the wishes of the AAA membership. Fifty-six percent of those responding to the poll favored moving the meeting to San Jose or canceling the meeting entirely as their first choice. Only 44% favored holding the meeting in the San Francisco Hilton as a first choice. Moreover, a great many respondents, including some who voted to keep the convention at the Hilton, indicated that they would find it impossible to cross picket lines and that they hoped that the AAA would not meet in a hotel that was locking out unionized employees.

The second factor was the financial position of the AAA. While we could not be sure that the San Francisco Hilton would recover the full amount, breaking the contract with the San Francisco Hilton would expose the Association to potential damages in excess of $1.2 million plus legal fees. Losses of that magnitude would have meant a reduction in program and services for AAA members, and/or the need for a special assessment or voluntary contributions from AAA members.

In response to our informing the Hilton that many of our members would boycott their hotel, the Hilton made us an offer: they would allow us to move our meeting to the Atlanta Hilton this year without the threat of a law suit, if we agreed to return to the San Francisco Hilton in 2006 (when we were scheduled to meet in Atlanta). In effect, the San Francisco Hilton and the Atlanta Hilton would trade their years of AAA meetings. However, the Atlanta Hilton was booked for our scheduled dates of November 17-21. December 15-19 was the first open date that the Board thought reasonable.

The Board realizes that this option is far from ideal. It entails substantial expense and inconvenience for all our members. Many of you have non-refundable tickets and will have to pay a $100 change fee. Some of you have already paid for your hotel rooms in San Francisco. Some of you will already have plans for the new dates. Still, this option allows the AAA to avoid two very serious outcomes: asking our members to cross picket lines and exposing the AAA to a $1.2 million suit by the Hilton.

The sad irony is that the Atlanta Hilton is a non-union hotel. The unionization of the Atlanta Hilton will be a battle for another day. But even the San Jose option would have meant signing a contract with the local Hilton. A committee appointed by the Executive Board last spring is developing a policy to favor living wage municipalities and unionized hotels in choosing future meeting venues. We will also seek a strike cancellation clause in future contracts with meeting hotels.

We deeply regret the cost and inconvenience of this change. We were presented with a situation not of our making, with no good options. The AAA staff moved very quickly to inform us of the situation as it arose and to explore the several possibilities available to us. An additional advantage of this move: it will be easier to orchestrate than the move to San Jose, and it gives the AAA staff slightly more time to engineer the move. The result should be an annual meeting that runs smoothly.

What isn’t being mentioned above (why?) is a letter dated Oct. 21st from the San Jose Convention and Visitor’s Bureau committing not only to space in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center and hotel space that covers “100% of [the] guest room requirement,” but also hotel rates that “include a financial consideration estimated at $150,000 that will help to offset any cancellation fees” and a promise to negotiate with airlines about reducing change fees. (The letter is already being circulated through anthropology e-mail lists, but I’m a little wary of reproducing it here.) While one point may have been made — the union apparently estimated a $5 million loss to San Francisco if the AAA, the biggest conference in the city of the month of November, pulls out — it still leaves the union hanging, with little incentive for or pressure on the San Francisco hotel collective to end the lockout. The financial fears of the AAA are clear — and certainly there will be association members who will not support a special assessment or pay extra dues — but surely the fine can be negotiated, and there will always be members (like me) who would be willing to pony up something. (Granted, I can donate that money to Local 2 now.)

Final Score: Hilton wins, UNITE HERE still gets nothing, and the AAA… why do I hear the sound of a toilet flushing in the distance?

So: Atlanta, in December. As my friend Jeff quipped, however, in light of the “civil-rights clause” in the union’s demands, “I assure you that the Atlanta Hilton will have plenty of African Americans on the staff.” [rimshot]

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The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is in something of a quandary. Their annual meeting will be held in San Francisco in less than a month. The problem is that 14 hotels, including the San Francisco Hilton where the conference will be held, have locked out 4,000 employees — housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers, telephone operators — of Local 2 of UNITE HERE.

As the San Francisco Chronicle points out, this isn’t just any “ordinary” strike. (The main issues that face the $26K/year employees are rising healthcare premiums and workweek hours, which is in a sense are “commonplace” demands.) While the union is overwhelmingly composed of immigrant workers (two-thirds are Asian and Latino) it is also demanding, in a so-called “civil-rights proposal,” that “quality hotel jobs [be made] more accessible to San Francisco’s African American community” — a population that has been steadily declining in the hotel workforce. I’m sure you folks can see the implications here: a victory would mean the creation of a greater solidarity between more workers of color, as well as a disruption of Management’s over-a-century-old tactic of pitting immigrants against African Americans.

As I write this, the AAA is scrambling to figure out what to do, and the debates among its members have become more and more heated. Breaking the contract with Hilton, signed in 1996, exposes the Association to possible financial damages of $1.2 million (and certainly more, because of legal fees). This is not to mention the 5,000-odd participants whose flights and hotels are booked (though I’m willing to bet they haven’t written their presentation papers yet — I have, ha ha). (One non-profit organization I’m familiar with promptly moved their event from one of the hotels (unfortunately to a non-unionized hotel), and is now having their lawyers contest the contract fees, which is in the few thousands.)

It has been suggested that one could still hold the conference at the Hilton, but to not buy food at the restaurants or stay in the rooms. Another alternative is to conduct the conference as usual, but to provide a special venue for the strikers in the conference (or for the participants to join the picketers as well, or to write — I chuckle at this part — a strongly-worded letter to the Hilton). Neither alternative seems very tenable, as they both entail crossing the picket lines; scabs will still be responsible for cleaning the conference rooms and filling the water pitchers and so on. Another solution is for different societies within the Association to decide among themselves to move their respective panels to alternative venues, but the ensuing chaos doesn’t seem worth it. (San Jose has also been floated as a possible site, but finding 5,000 hotel rooms and the conference space — not to mention paying the additional expenses on top of the impending Hilton fines — seems impossible, certainly in less than a month’s time.)

I write this from a somewhat lucky position: I live in San Francisco, and so I will not have to eat any airline tickets or hotel reservations. (For utterly selfish reasons, it’s a bummer that I may not get to present my paper — it’s not very easy to get a paper accepted — but that’s just it: “a bummer.”) While not all anthropologists are so lucky, some will hopefully have universities that will reimburse their expenses. But canceling the conference will send a powerful message to the hotels’ Multi-Employer Group. I’m as cash-strapped as any Cal State assistant professor is, but my life is a lot more comfortable than a $26,000-a-year dishwasher now being paid $200 a week out of a strike fund, and if the membership has to absorb some of the damages, then so be it. (What sucks is that Hilton won’t be losing very much money over this, and it doesn’t necessarily help the union financially, unless the hotels’ collective bargaining group see the light after AAA cancels and end the lockout before Thanksgiving.)

Some participants and members of the AAA have already threatened to cancel their association memberships if the conference continues at the Hilton. To cross the picket line seems to me, in this case, a violation of the AAA Code of Ethics, and I quote the relevant — indeed, the basic — section here:

Anthropological researchers have primary ethical obligations to the people, species, and materials they study and to the people with whom they work. These obligations can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge, and can lead to decisions not to undertake or to discontinue a research project when the primary obligation conflicts with other responsibilities, such as those owed to sponsors or clients.

I think the Association would do well to heed that reminder. If anthropologists are indeed obligated to seek social justice — or at the very least, to remain the tiniest bit relevant to communities outside the academy, especially in an era where workers’ rights both in this country and overseas are consistently and systematically eroded — then I see no other recourse.

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