Before Hurricane Katrina, Willie Woods worked in banquet catering at the Fairmont Hotel (now the Roosevelt), a rare business in the city where hospitality workers were unionized. Woods was a member of the union and he felt the “union difference,” as he called it: raises, health care, benefits. When he returned to the city after the storm, he took on three jobs at non-unionized hotels just to feed his family. His firsthand understanding of the advantages of unionized workplaces motivated him to start organizing at the Hilton Riverside. After an uphill battle replete with union busting and other anti-labor tactics, he said, the workers finally won a contract in 2018. But for Woods, this was only the beginning.
“We want this city to have union jobs for all hospitality workers,” Woods said. “That’s our vision for the city. That’s my vision for the city.”
Woods is now the president of the local chapter of Unite Here, a labor union that represents 300,000 workers across the country in industries including hospitality, food service and transportation. He shared his experiences and hopes for the future of labor organizing at an event called “Organizing New Orleans: Black Labor, Tourism, and the Work of Hospitality” on Monday (April 15) sponsored by the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies.
The panel was connected to “Don’t Stand Alone: Black Labor Organizing in New Orleans,” an exhibit currently on display at the Tulane School of Architecture’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design. The exhibit is a joint effort by the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, grassroots organizers at Stand with Dignity, and graduate students and professors at Tulane and the University of New Orleans.
Lynnell Thomas, a professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston who has studied the relationship between race, tourism and cultural production in New Orleans, joined Woods to discuss tourism and hospitality in the city.
Thomas, a New Orleans native, described how the decline of other industries within the city, such as oil and gas, led to the city’s economic dependence on tourism.
In her book “Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory,” Thomas charts how the tourism industry sells racialized “tourist narratives” about the city’s culture that that evoke a romanticized notion of the pre-Civil Rights era South and materially harm the Black hospitality workers and culture bearers who sustain the industry, she said.
“We’re taught and trained early on how much we need tourism, how much it helps the city,” she said. “It hasn’t helped everybody in the city, and it has certainly helped some people more than others.”
To combat the extractive nature of the tourism industry, Thomas is working alongside another scholar to produce a “People’s Guide to New Orleans” as an alternative, social justice-centered tour guide for visitors. She sees the guide, which is still being drafted, as one effort to “highlight some of the sites and stories of resistance that have happened in the city,” she said.
For Woods, the mismatch between tourism industry profits and low wages for hospitality workers drives his organizing.
“We need to know where that billion dollars is going,” he said. “It’s got to come into the workers’ pockets, not just the company.”
Woods said that organizing in New Orleans is especially important in light of anti-labor legislation and a new, ultra-conservative governor. As tourists continue to visit the city at numbers approaching pre-COVID years, Woods wants travelers to understand that New Orleans “is a working town,” he said.
“Respect the hospitality workers who built this city,” he said.
The discussion also served as a gathering place for those involved in the city’s labor movement to share ideas and talk about what organizing in the city currently looks like. Audience members, who identified themselves as graduate students, hospitality workers and tip-based workers, discussed how organizers are preparing for the 2025 Super Bowl, how labor movements within the city have forged cross-racial solidarity, and how workers might look to other cities, such as Las Vegas — where tens of thousands of hospitality workers are unionized — as models for labor organizing.
Erleen Ellis, a graduate student at UNO who did archival research for the exhibit, lauded Woods for “giving this history back to the workers” and highlighting the agency of the city’s workers.
“What companies do is disconnect us from this history,” Thomas said.
“Don’t Stand Alone,” the exhibit on the history of Black labor organizing in New Orleans, was a fitting backdrop for Monday’s discussion. The exhibit covers events dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the General Strike of 1892 and the efforts of Storyville sex workers to desegregate red light districts, to post-Katrina organizing efforts across industries in the city.
“Don’t Stand Alone: Black Labor Organizing in New Orleans” will run through May 10 at the Small Center. The next event tied to the exhibit, a discussion about educators and organizing, will be on April 24.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the name of Erleen Ellis.
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