UNITE HERE Local 11, currently representing over 30,000 hospitality workers in southern California and Arizona, has a long history in Los Angeles. The union traces its origins to the Waiters and Bartenders International union founded in 1891 (later Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees or HERE), which organized different hospitality workers (cooks, bartenders, waitresses, etc.) into separate locals, allowing for an unusually high number of female leaders compared to the U.S. labor movement generally. These separate locals were abandoned after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and reorganized into those that were geographic in scope (i.e. Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Long Beach, etc.). 

In the 1970s and 1980s, HERE locals experienced protracted leadership struggles and significant declines in membership density. A newly hostile environment for unions generally coincided with corporate consolidation in the hospitality sector and the emergence of new subcontracting practices, which resulted in the severing of long-standing union contracts and the loss of well-paying union jobs. Increased levels of immigration after 1965 led to divisions between the mostly-Anglo “front of the house” staff (e.g., waiters, waitresses, and bartenders) and mostly immigrant “back of the house” staff (e.g. kitchen and cleaning staff). Spanish-speaking members of Local 11 fought for fuller participation in their union but often met resistance from their local union leaders.

Local 11’s contract campaigns were examples of organized labor’s new assertiveness in the 1990s. More hotels were controlled by multinational corporations and hotel management in Los Angeles resisted efforts to unionize their workers. The union built worker committees in every workplace it represented and mobilized members for dramatic public actions that put pressure on hotels and politicians to negotiate good contracts for workers.