Thomas Breen photo
Carla Vallati, back in uniform, outside the Omni.
After 15 months out of work, Carla Vallati returned to her job cleaning rooms at the Omni Hotel — and credits local labor-friendly pandemic legislation for helping.
Vallati, 51, grew up in the Hill and in Fair Haven. She currently lives with her four kids in Fair Haven Heights.
She is employed as a guest room attendant at the high-end Omni Hotel on Temple Street, where she has worked for the past six years.
During an interview with the Independent, Vallati recalled two key dates in her recent professional and personal life: March 20, 2020 and June 13, 2021.
The former date was when she had to clear out her locker at the hotel as she and her colleagues were first dismissed from their hotel jobs at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The latter was when she was called back to work and “first put back on the schedule” as hotel business picked up during the pandemic’s early-summer lull.
The Omni Hotel at Yale, on Temple Street.
What kept her sane during those intervening 15 months, Vallati said, and what likely played a key role in her returning to work , was her union’s — UNITE HERE Local 217 — successful advocacy for a local hotel worker recall law.
The Board of Alders passed such the law last December, and the state followed suit with a near-identical bill that the governor signed in July.
The local and state legislation requires hotels to give laid-off former employees first dibs at returning to their old jobs.
“It was an up and down year, but with the union keeping us united, helping us stay together and fight together, gave me a sense of belonging that I wasn’t so alone through this pandemic,” Vallati said. “Because it was a rough year. It gave me a sense of home, and that I still belonged to a team.”
A spokesperson for the Omni did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article. The head of the state’s hotel trade group association was more skeptical that the worker recall laws have had a substantive impact on an industry where it was already common practice before Covid-19 to prioritize hiring back more experienced employees. (See more for that take below.)
For Vallati, the worker recall legislation — and the union organizing that led to those bills’ passage — kept her sane during a time of great uncertainty and distress.
“I went through a little bit of a depression. It was not pretty,” she said about those 15 months away from work. “I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, what was going to happen, how I was going to pay my bills. I think a lot of the country was spiraling.”
When the pandemic hit and she lost work, she added, “It was devastating. I was completely worried about my job, not only for the money, but also because it’s home to me and I love it there. I didn’t want to go anywhere else.”
On March 20, 2020, when she and her colleagues cleared out their lockers, she remembered receiving from management a packet explaining that the hotel was going to be closed for a while. It provided instructions on how to file for unemployment.
In the summer and fall of that year, she remembered, the union “had a lot of Zoom calls to get the recall put into place. I was on every Zoom call. It felt great to know that we were still together and fighting for the same thing.
“At the Omni, we’re all like family to each other. The success of the Omni is because of us.”
Asked about how the hotel is doing now that she has been called back to work, Vallati said, “As long as Yale’s up and running pretty decently, we should do OK.”
She said she was called back to work in mid-June by the head of associate services at the hotel because Yale was having a big event at the Omni.
“It just made me a lot calmer,” she said about having the worker recall law in place. “I think my kids are happier, because I’m happier.”
“Hospitality As A Career, Not Just As A Job”
Connecticut Lodging Association Executive Director Virginia Kozlowski offered a different take on the impact and efficacy of the worker recall laws, both state and local.
To Kozlowski, those bills have had minimal influence on the actual operations of local hotels because the industry has long prioritized hiring back more experienced employees after layoffs.
“It’s easier to bring back somebody who’s trained and familiar with the operation,” she said.
The top challenge that New Haven and Connecticut hotels are facing right now is finding people available and willing to work, she said.
“They’re still having challenges getting people back into the workforce.” That could be for a variety of reasons, she added, from a lack of availability of daycare to the possibility of Covid infection to conflicts with scheduling to better hours and money elsewhere.
“We’re cautious at this point,” Kozlowski said. “Leisure travel has been very strong through this summer. But business travel has not returned, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be returning anytime soon. We’re concerned about maintaining workforce.”
Kozlowski said she was recently at a trade conference where a speaker said that 35 percent of people who were in hospitality and who lost their jobs during Covid have moved on to other sectors.
Her proposed remedy? “Hospitality needs to be more proactive in offering hospitality as a career, not just as a job.” That means hotel employers working closely with workforce development agencies to train prospective employees for employment at hotels, and to make those jobs appealing enough to attract workers long-term.
“That’s going to be a challenge going forward,” she said. “Finding people to work in the hospitality business.”
Wonderful story of a worker fighting through so much hardship. So disrespectful for Virginia to discount these stories and the struggles of workers who have been facing such hardship. Hope, assurance, and clear expectations might not be something she has to worry about, but they sure are a concern for out-of-work workers.