Brown University President Ruth Simmons announced this past week the university would stop investing in HEI Hotels, owner of the Hilton Long Beach and operator of Embassy Suites Irvine.

Simmons said she has accepted the recommendation of the university’s committee on investment ethics, which cited allegations of workers’ rights violations in recommending that Brown end future investments in the hotel company. Workers at both Southern California HEI properties have called for better working conditions and demanded a fair process for deciding whether to organize a union.

HEI Hotels is an investment company that owns and operates more than 30 hotels across the country. It buys hotels and employs a range of techniques to drastically cut costs — a process that workers say comes at their expense. HEI raises capital to buy hotels from university endowments such as those of Brown, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and more.

“This is a monumental victory for the workers of the HEI-operated Embassy Suites Irvine,” said Anna Maria Trevino, a housekeeper at the Irvine business hotel. “The students of Brown heard our pleas for justice and basic rights on the job, and they took those calls to decision makers at their university, demanding change.”

Disneyland Resort workers announced a class action lawsuit on Tuesday, Feb. 22 demanding that the Walt Disney Company stop exposing its employees to identify theft by encoding social security numbers in worker identification cards.

The suit is expected to cover the some 20,000 Disneyland Resort employees, and may include thousands more ABC and Disney Studios employees in the state of California.

Disney World workers in Florida have the same ID system with encoded social security numbers, but are not encompassed in this Federal lawsuit.

LOS ANGELES – Hotel workers from across Los Angeles converged on the Hyatt Century Plaza Thursday, Feb. 10 to send a message to the hotel giant: Stop sweeping housekeeper pain and injuries under the rug. Hundreds of hotel employees, many of whom are working under expired contracts, chose the Hyatt because of its reputation for housekeeper injury – a major concern throughout the hospitality industry.

When women put on a housekeeper’s uniform, they become invisible. Many people go to expensive hotels and get great service and never know what’s behind the scenes.  Behind the experience of comfort and luxury that hotel housekeepers provide is a persistent pattern of pain and injury. Some injuries can be debilitating.

A new Web site launched today, Monday, Feb. 7, sheds unfavorable light on two Walt Disney Company Board of Directors’ past connections with failed insurance giant AIG and belly-up bank Washington Mutual.

The site, DisneyOverpaysExecs.org, encourages shareholders to take a closer look at Disney’s executive compensation practices, particularly because Fred Langhammer, a former AIG director who served on the compensation committee, now heads the same committee for Disney. While Langhammer served, AIG endured criticism for showering large bonuses and lavish junkets on top executives as the company imploded.