How Hotel Workers in NYC Organized a Union a Century Ago

Americans love unions. The idea of workers banding together to demand their rights from employers is so powerful, a recent poll found that unions are more popular than big corporations by a wide margin. In fact, according to the Economic Policy Institute, 16 million more workers joined unions in 2024, and millions more wanted to join unions but couldn’t. 

Ahead of Labor Day 2025, we’ll turn to Shaun Richman, a former labor organizer turned academic and author who teaches labor history at SUNY Empire State University. He is the author of Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century.

His latest book is We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953. The book is a seminal history of how hotel workers in New York City organized more than a hundred years ago, offering a powerful history lesson for today, especially in light of the anti-worker, anti-union policies of the Trump administration. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's talk about the origins of the industry, where this group of workers whose history you write, originated. We think today of hotels—your story is about hotel workers—we think today about, of hotels as being very much part of any modern society. But in New York, in the early 1900s, it was, and even nationwide, really, it wasn't a very common thing to have big hotels. And which of course then begins the impetus for workers wanting to organize. So tell us that origin story of the industry itself. 

Shaun Richman: Right. Well, you had, you had public houses and you had inns, which was, you know, a person would have a house with an extra room or two. And that was very common, very connected to either a railroad travel or stagecoach travel. What New York invented, and really it was, it was the first families of New York that invented it were factories of pleasure. 

And, what they did is they actually, they cannibalized their own real estate. Ffifth Avenue from like 35th Street to 42nd Street was a row of just millionaires’ mansions until William Astor tore his own home down and turned it into the Waldorf Hotel.