Gotta build that empty hotel, though

In solidarity with the hundreds of unemployed and habitually abused New Orleans hospitality workers fighting for a fair share of the Convention Center's ill gotten slush fund, the Communications Workers of America are threatening to pull their 2021 convention out of New Orleans.

The Convention Center has yet to address the demands from a coalition of 35 local groups, called the Coalition to Create a Fair Fund for Hospitality Workers. That qualifies as an ongoing labor conflict, a CWA official told The Lens.

“There’s almost always a clause that says we don’t have to go there if there’s a labor dispute,” CWA Secretary-General Sara Steffens told The Lens in an interview. “Every union builds that into our contracts for these conferences and conventions. The last thing we’d ever do is cross a picket line.”

The current dispute began in March, when the newly-formed local coalition began calling on the Convention Center to release $100 million of its reserves — totalling about $180 to $200 million — to support the tens of thousands of tourism workers in New Orleans who are out of work due to the coronavirus crisis.

This will be a fun argument to watch. We already know the Convention Center considers their hotel scheme where they throw public money at hotel and real estate developers to be an "economic recovery" project.  A statement from the hospitality workers points out the obvious with regard to how such a "recovery" actually needs to be distributed.

“As Mr. Sawaya said, the Convention Center’s ‘duty during these challenging times is to provide service to [their] community.’ Their community is made up of nearly 100k hospitality workers across the GNO region without whom there would be neither conventions nor tourism nor the various taxes that support the Convention Center.  We hope that the concerns raised by the CWA as well as ourselves get a less dismissive hearing in the near future.”

I suppose the Convention Center could say that there's a good chance the CWA convention, like a lot of conventions, is going to end up getting cancelled or greatly reduced in size anyway. But if that's true, then it makes a brand new hotel seem even more ridiculous than it already was. Meanwhile, there are people who could use that money right now.