Hotel workers fret about a new rival: Alexa at the front desk

The bosses have not yet introduced facial recognition technology at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. But from her perch behind the front desk at the pink neo-moorish palace overlooking Waikiki Beach, Jean Te’o-gibney can see it coming.

“Marriott just rolled it out in China,” enabling guests to check into their rooms without bothering with front-desk formalities, said Te’o-gibney, a 53-year-old grandmother of seven. “It seems they know they will be eliminating our jobs.”

Similar fears simmer throughout Marriott’s vast network of hotels, the largest in the United States. During the past two weeks, Te’o-gibney and thousands of other Marriott workers — cooks and cashiers, bellhops and housekeepers — have voted to authorize their union, UNITE HERE, to strike at dozens of locations from Waikiki to Boston and San Diego to Detroit.

Alongside the usual demands for higher wages and better workplace safety, the union is bringing another issue to the table, asking for procedures to protect workers affected by new technologies and the innovations they spur.

“You are not going to stop technology,” said UNITE HERE’S president, D. Taylor. “The question is whether workers will be partners in its deployment or bystanders that get run over by it.”

Unlike manufacturing workers, whose jobs have been lost to automation since as far back as the 1950s, workers in the lowwage portion of the service sector had remained until now largely shielded from job-killing technologies.

Many earned too little to justify large capital costs to replace them. A typical hotel or motel desk clerk earns just over