The hotel and restaurant and garment industries are among the first to form unions in American history. The history of UNITEHERE! officially begins in 2004, with the merger of the garment industry union UNITE and the hotel and restaurant industry HERE.[1] However, the origins of groups comprising UNITEHERE! stretch back to 1891, the year the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) international formed.[2] A contentious dispute between UNITE and HERE threatened to derail the entity for good. This research will explore the history and different manifestations of UNITEHERE!
UNITE HERE is a union that represents workers throughout the United States and Canada that work in the hotel, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, distribution, laundry and airport industries.[3] While HERE represented hotel and restaurant employees since the late nineteenth century, UNITE did not come into existence until 1995, when the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) merged with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU).[4] The ILGWU had been in existence since 1900, while the ACTWU was a merger of textile and clothing workers (TWUA and ACWA).
In the early 2000s, HERE and UNITE worked together to organize the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, the Yale strike and an organizing campaign.[5] During the latter half of the 2000s, UNITEHERE! experienced rocky relations with other unions. In 2005 it withdrew from the AFL-CIO and engaged in a nearly two-year-long dispute with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).[6] UNITE broke away from HERE, claiming the formation of a new union called Workers United. The dispute served to "undermine the other's union organizing drives," but was settled in 2010.[7] Part of the settlement included ownership of Amalgamated Bank, the only labor-owned bank in the U.S., to be trans
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