Gill seeking
to regain control
of Local 5

The ousted former hotel union
leader heads a slate in the election to replace the international trustee

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By Russ Lynch
Star-Bulletin

The union that just successfully negotiated a new contract with six major Waikiki hotels is about to elect new officers who will end day-to-day control of the union by its international parent.

The 11,000-member Local 5 of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees AFL-CIO will conduct the election over the next several weeks, culminating in a ballot count July 6, said Sherri Chiesa, the Western regional director of the union. Chiesa arrived in early March to take over the local as trustee.

The first candidate to announce was Eric Gill, who was elected to the chief management position of financial secretary-treasurer in early 2000 but says he has largely been pushed aside by a system favorable to the loser in that election, Tony Rutledge.

Gill said yesterday that he is running with a team of Orlando Soriano, officially Local 5 president since the 2000 election, and Gill associate Hernando Tan, lead business agent.

Rutledge said today that he also intends to run for financial secretary-treasurer, with his own slate of candidates.

Chiesa said nominations will be accepted June 7. Ballots will then go into the mail no later than June 14, the votes will be counted July 6 and "I will install new officers on the seventh of July," she said. Chiesa said at that point the local will be under new control and the international will withdraw its trusteeship, letting the new local officers run the union.

Gill said that despite having won the election last year, albeit narrowly, he ended up with a board dominated by Rutledge supporters. The result was a stall in contract talks and it was Rutledge who pushed successfully to wrest control from the properly elected officers and put it in the hands of the parent union, Gill said.

While Gill was attempting to negotiate the six-hotel contract, Rutledge was "pulling strings with his many friends at the HERE International Union," Gill said in his statement yesterday. "He was successful in getting the International to intervene."

The result, he said, was that Rutledge supporters ended up in control.

However, Gill and Rutledge have both have said they ended up working well together in the contract negotiations, along with Chiesa.

About 5,000 Local 5 workers at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, the Hyatt Regency Waikiki and the Sheraton hotels were represented in the labor talks that ended with a new contract tentatively agreed to May 7 and later ratified.

Local 5 has about 6,000 other members, most of whom work for hotels where individual contracts have yet to be negotiated.

The move by the parent union to take over Local 5 came after a string of events that started with a 1997 election of officers in which an unopposed Rutledge slate was elected. A federal court later ruled that Gill's name was illegally kept off the ballot and a new election was ordered.

In that election, Gill squeaked past Rutledge and Soriano was elected president.