PASADENA, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday granted the National Labor Relations Board's petition for enforcement of a 2011 decision against owners of the Pacific Beach Hotel, a luxury Waikiki hotel, in a decade-long dispute.
It affirmed a 2011 injunctive order against the hotel by a federal district court.
The NLRB's case against the HTH Corporation and the Pacific Beach Hotel dates back to a union-organizing drive in 2002. The case began when Local 142 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union sought to organize hotel employees.
The union eventually won recognition. But the NLRB found that the hotel committed numerous federal labor law violations, including illegally firing employees for their union activity, engaging in bad faith bargaining and illegally withdrawing recognition of the union, and failing to bargain for a contract.
"Two themes repeat themselves in the decade-long history of this dispute," the Court wrote. "The first is HTH's defiance of the Labor Act and its employees' statutory rights. The second is HTH's consistent losses before the agency and the courts. A skeptical adjudicator might question whether HTH has ever taken seriously its obligations under the law. We hope that we do not need to consider that question again."
The NLRB ordered HTH to reimburse the union for its bargaining costs, to read an NLRB notice to employees during their work hours and to bargain in good faith with the union for an additional year.