her line manager that she was pregnant. “I am a five-star employee working in a three-star hotel,” she says.

A Spanish night receptionist, a geologist by trade, earning £17,000 a year, says over six years, staff have been cut and the workload increased while his pay has risen by pennies. He is now a member of Heat.

A few days before Tuesday’s strike meeting, a group of around 20 people gathered outside the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane. They were there to commemorate a milestone on the road to poor conditions. Thirty years ago, members of its banqueting staff were dismissed for attempting to join a union. At the core of employment law is “mutuality of obligation”. The employer is obliged to offer hours; the employee is obliged tobecame a waiter at the Carlyle Hotel, close to Central Park, in 1980 and a full-time official of the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council in 1985. The union for hotel workers is part of Unite Here, which, in central New York, is divided into eight locals. Donovan is president of Local 6, which has 23,000 members, speaking 67 languages.

The union is about to ratify an extraordinary agreement between its members and the major hotel chains (around 71% of the city’s hotel rooms). The deal runs to 2026 and represents room attendants, housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers and others. A non-unionised housekeeper can earn just over £7 an hour. In Local 6, the rate is £16 an hour and higher, with health cover, holidays, controlled hours and access to