Five months of health care for hotel staff

Thousands of city hotel workers laid off in the coronavirus crisis will get five months of health insurance as part of an emergency deal reached Thursday between the workers’ union and hotel owners.

An arbitrator imposed on hotel owners and the New York Hotel Trades Council, which represents 40,000 non-management hotel workers, the deal, which provides five months of health care for city hotel workers as well as accrued paid leave.

Hotel workers in the city’s suburbs, in the Albany region and in northern New Jersey will get six months of health care.

Workers will also be able be collect pay for their accrued time off, which ranges from 23 to 45 days depending how long they have been on the job.

“I’m really pleased with this,” union head Peter Ward told the Daily News. “We’d like to have more, but we’d always like to have more.”

By next week, about 35,000 city hotel workers will have lost their jobs in the crisis — and some hotels are already entirely empty, Ward said.

The coronavirus pandemic is a bigger crisis for the hotel business than 9/11, the 2008 stock market crash and Superstorm Sandy combined, Ward said. “This is more and worse than all of that together,” he said.

Some hotel workers may get hired back as hotels are converted into temporary hospitals that need staff to clean and maintain them. Other hotels might hire back workers as they reopen to house nurses, homeless people and the National Guard, Ward said.

The hotel industry nationwide has been hammered hard by the virus, and is bleeding about $1.4 billion in revenue per week.

The Hotel Association Of New York City, an umbrella organization for the city’s hotel owners, did not immediately respond to request for comment