 Yeah, we're back, we're alive. This is Think Tech, who I am, Jay Fidel, Thursday at five. And we're talking about local five at five. Demand's extension of unemployment benefits, additional COVID restrictions makes it worse for them. And we got the exact right person to talk about that, Eric Gill of Local Five. Hi, Eric, welcome to the show. Hi, Dave, how are you doing? Yeah, well, I'm still suffering in terms of trying to figure out where this COVID thing is taking us. And I have this impression that it's not anywhere good and that it's eating our economy while we speak. But you would be more familiar with that in the hospitality industry about how it is eating our workforce. Wanna talk about it? Yeah, it's the most important thing that people need to be talking about right now. If we're going to have a future in our economy, we do have to, no matter what future we may decide to do, we do have to secure the jobs we need now. And we need to avoid them being deleted and diminished. And that's what's happening on a massive scale right now is the best jobs in our tourism workforce are being cut down considerably using the pandemic as a pretext. And this is resulting in much enhanced profits for corporate hotel owners and operators and thousands and thousands of white people out of work and many of them that will be permanent. This is a situation where the pandemic did not cause this but provided the pretext and the opportunity for employers to do what they wanted to do all along which was reduce the workforce and increase their profit margin. And this is playing out in front of our face right now. We had almost a hundred percent occupancy over the summer. Our members in the union hotels that have rights to return and have a contract and have the ability to enforce those rights. We never cracked 70% of the 2019 work hours. And now we've gone down since the end of August and it's worse now than it was then. So even this is a real problem for our community with I'm proud that we've built a high standard of wages and benefits for tourism workers in Hawaii. This is something that Local Five has done. We've spent 50 years doing this and we've achieved a high standard across the country and one of the highest standards for hotel work wages and benefits. And those are the jobs that are being lost. And there's no good jobs to replace them. And so sending somebody who is getting 40 hours a week making decent money in the hotel with decent benefits able to support their families and putting them into the gig economy is just it's gonna be terrible for our economy. And I don't know how the legislature guys can ignore this. They're fighting over the carers money, all the money, all the government money that came in and not taking any steps to protect our tax base next year. And how are we gonna pay for the schools with everybody unemployed? It's, this is a situation where the interests of Hawaii's people and the interests of our corporate hotel owners diverged. What's good for them is not good for us. What's good for them is less people working. That's not good for us. And if we're gonna have alternatives to tourism we have to hold on to the best jobs in tourism and find alternatives, not get rid of the best jobs and suffer until somebody comes up with a new industry. That is not a viable option for our community. So it sounds for a moment that you're the voice in the wilderness here. Who joins you in making this point? Who joins you in putting some pressure on the legislature? Well, I was interested, in several weeks ago I was on a PBS panel and they were talking about the future of tourism and there were a lot of community people there. And every single person said the same thing. What we need is fewer tourists of higher quality to generate more for our economy. And if you look at the actual situation what's happened is we've got more and more tourists and the jobs have not been generated with these additional tourists. So naturally Hawaii's people are feeling the pinch because what's happened is the increase in tourists between six million and 10 million that didn't increase our jobs. It didn't increase the hotel workforce. What it did was push everybody into our neighborhoods in vacation rentals. And today I guess a star advertiser reported 20,000 vacation rentals. That's two thirds of the number of work rooms in Waikiki. We're talking about a major shift from good paying guests who use hotel services, get good services, spend the money in the resort areas versus formerly new guests out in our communities putting stress on our neighborhoods, putting stress on our traffic, our parks, all of our public services and we're not getting employment in return for that. Now this is the very point that Jerry Agrusa made Professor Jerry Agrusa from the Travel Industry Management School in Scheidler just a week ago. You're saying the same thing he was saying and putting pressure on those neighborhoods doesn't help us. If we're gonna provide quality tourism we have to provide quality tourism through the workers, through the people who engage with the tourists. There's no engagement in one of those bed and breakfast situations. If you look at it, I mean tourists in the neighborhood, they gotta go out to do anything, right? What are they gonna do? Sit in a house, in a resort area we have restaurants for them. If the restaurants are open we have activities, tours for them. We have all kinds of things for them in the resort areas and most resort guests leave their car at the hotel most of the day. They might go golfing or something. Those same guests if they were in a vacationer or on that car going everywhere. They're spending their time in the parks. They're putting pressure, they're looking on their Instagram influencers and they're going up into our sacred spaces, our private places, the places that local people have always considered ours. It's not ours anymore. So people are turning against it and the more thoughtful elements in the industry are recognizing this as you say. I'm glad to hear the TIM is seeing it because shedding services and becoming a low quality service destination is not a good future for Hawaii. And the thoughtful people in tourism agree with that. Last week I had Ernie Nishizaki speaking to our convention delegates. He ran Kyoya for years and was a general manager in numerous hotels and started as a bus boy at one of our hotels. And he said the same thing. We need a high quality service standard here. And especially if we're gonna get our Japanese guests back they want their room cleaned. They don't wanna hear from Hilton that they're not going to clean rooms every day anymore. And this is a key point. What kind of tourists are we gonna get if we don't even clean their rooms, if we don't provide a meal, we won't park their car for them. What kind of tourists are we gonna get? And it's- We're gonna get a vacation rental tourists as well. We're gonna get the tourists we don't want which is what many Hawaii people experienced over the last six months. We had a lot of people in here over the summer. And Hawaii people are going, Well, let's see, let's see your chart. You have a chart, a couple of charts on this issue. I would like to take a look at them because I think they demonstrate your point. Here's one. Yeah, so this is our, I can't wait to have even seen this one. It says visitor arrivals as a percentage of 2019, 2019 same day arrivals. Yeah, so you saw over the course of the year, the occupancy built slowly, built fairly rapidly. We peaked in the spring and then had a dip. And then at July 4th, at the top of the summer, we were at virtually 90 plus percent across the board in Waikiki. And since that time, the arrivals have trended down somewhat. And you can see some big gaps. But the visitor arrivals came close to where we were at in 2019. And yet the number of workers recalled is a much lower curve. I think that's on another of the graph. Why don't we take a look at the other, there's another interesting graph. Yeah, this is the visitor arrivals versus 2019 or rather, excuse me, this is from 1990. And what you see here is that the blue graph is the jobs. And the red graph, the red line is the arrivals. So what we've seen here in the last five, six years, especially, and if you look at it from the standpoint, you know, we had a period of fairly flat line where the jobs and the visitor arrivals were fairly consistent, but that started to take off. And that's that $4 million extra visitors there that you see. And what happened was the number of visitors went up, the jobs didn't, it went up a little bit. So a 50% increase in arriving tourists resulted in only a 10% increase in actual employment. So naturally, Hawaii people are questioning this, how is this better for us? Having more and more guests, more and more tourists, and we're not getting any more jobs out of this. And, you know, unfortunately, the jobs in vacation rentals are pretty lousy jobs. These jobs have no benefits, they don't have a pension, they don't have medical, and many of them are off the book, 1099 type jobs, and you can't depend on them. You can't raise a family on that, that's side job work. And, but the main jobs are going away and all we're gonna have is side job work. So what, when you approach the hospitality, the hotels, the hotel association, what have you, and say, what happened, you guys? How come, you know, your industry isn't hiring as many people now? What do they say to you in response? Well, they don't. Generally, they've refused to bargain with us for the last year and a half. And so we, they have dodged the question, but we know what they say because we can read it in a paper. You know, the head of Hilton says to his investors, we're gonna reduce, permanently reduce the workforce to increase the value to our investors. And this is quoted in the Wall Street Journal. The biggest land, the biggest, one of the most important owners is park hotels now owns all the Hilton real estate. They have demanded that Hilton and the other operators that operate hotels that they own reduce the labor force. In particular, they promised to reduce, eliminate the practice of daily cleaning of rooms. So this is what they're promising their investors. And their investors are rewarding them. Hilton stock went up on these announcements. So what's happening is the corporate interest is they're gonna make more profit and they're gonna promise their investors that that's what they do. And what we do is we lose jobs. And in this case, we lost 30% of the work hours with similar occupancy levels between 2019 and 2021. We had 30% at more than 30% less work hours for those same weeks. So they're doing it right in front of our eyes. And they're doing- Is this a catch-up thing, Erica? Are they saying, for example, that in the, say the six or eight month period in 2020, you know, when things were really looking bad, they would take, they would take huge losses. They had no way to cover those losses. Oh, they did before last year. Yeah, they certainly did. They're trying to make up for it, trying to, you know, bring in more revenue, more profit now to cover the losses they had there. Are they saying that? Well, they were saying that, but the fact of the matter is, these guys didn't get hurt last year at all. I mean, what they've done is they've loaded up on cheap cash, you know, the banks and everybody are letting, giving away free money. So what they've done is they've loaded up, they've doubled down on their debt burden. The problem for these owners is they've been playing for 20 years, you know, a bubble game, you know, building a speculative real estate bubble in hotel real estate. And the hotels have been priced, not based on the price of the bricks and mortar of the land, but based on how big of a note that property could drive. So a lot of these hotels, especially the ones in the last few years that flipped ownership, you know, they bought in at a price that assumed that the place was gonna be turning over revenue at a 90 plus percent occupancy level. So when you go down to zero occupancy, of course they get a shock. Now, they, on the other hand, this is something they've been planning for years. They've been trying to do this for years. That's why we, in our strike in 2018, we struck and got language that's saying, you're gonna clean that room each and every day. Well, they forgot how to read and... What happened? Are they abrogating that provision? Absolutely, they're ignoring it. And they're counting on the fact that arbitrators enforcing labor agreements do give substantial leeway for the pandemic. And so, you know, we have a case coming up next month and it's taken us a year to get this case before an arbitrator. They keep dragging it out. And the fact of the matter is our language is clear. It says, you will clean that room each and every day. And they say, well, we have a principal disagreement on the interpretation of that language. And I'm going, oh, really? Sounds like English to me. Yeah, you guys forgot how to read or what? So it's all made up stuff, Jay. That's what they're doing. They're saying whatever they have to say, but what they're doing is selling their investors on a new model of tourism that's gonna be a stripped down model. And they're consciously, they're discussing this in a trade press. They're consciously trying to emulate what the airlines did, where once upon a time, we got a meal, we got a pillow, we got a blanket. You know, we could put on all kind of things on board and now they're charging us for all those things. That's where they wanna go with the industry, which is fine for them. But for Hawaii, it's a disaster. We are an expensive destination. We can't afford, it is expensive to come here. Well, it undermines our brand, doesn't it? It absolutely undermines Hawaii's brand. If we are seen as a bargain basement, no frills, kind of a spirit airlines type thing, why would anyone choose to come here? So wouldn't the HTA be concerned about this? Wouldn't the hotel association be concerned? Wouldn't professional hospitality organizations be concerned? Wouldn't they wanna say something we don't want the brand undermined? Yeah, and I think they're starting to. I was struck. I mean, I've known Keith Vieira, for example, for 40 years. He used to work with me at the hotel way back when. And he and I rarely agree. But that night on PBS, he said the same thing. There's two basic things that we have to do to stop the bleeding. We have to maintain a high service standard with the jobs, that means service, means people providing service, somebody to park your car, somebody to bring you a meal, somebody to clean your room, somebody to do all those things that people want from a hotel. We need high quality service and we've got to cut down on vacation rentals because what that's doing is it's just taking the overflow and just slamming that into our community and undermining our housing, undermining our quality of life and turning Hawai'i's people against tourism. And that is another bad thing that would happen. So our aloha spirit is one of the reasons people come here. You can go out of Waikiki and you can drive to Haleva and you can go to the bar and you can come home back to the hotel with your kidney and your wallet. That's not true in Cancun. That's not true in Jamaica. That's not true in many other resort areas. You don't go into the neighborhoods because you're not going to come back. And so Hawai'i is an open society because our people welcome tourists until now. And if they screw that up, you're not going to have- What are we talking about all hotels? We're talking about the big ones, the international owners and we're also talking about the little ones, all of them or just a subset of the hotels you see? Well, look, they're all competing, right? So what happens is this being driven by the biggies. I think Hilton is the most militant on this, but Marriott and Hyatt are the other big employers here. Hygate, they've all done this. The big corporate, global corporations have done this, right? We're putting pressure on them. We're hoping to break that ranks. But right now they're all doing this. They're all saying it's on request. And the fact is because they don't bring in enough housekeepers in the first place for the day, you can request your room getting cleaned. It's still not going to get cleaned because they don't have anybody to do it. So we have a long way to go to get back even where we were two years ago. And but this is being driven by the big corporate hotels. What you see is some hotels that have relative independence from that. For example, Kahala, here's a Japanese owner. They want it to maintain high standards all along. They told us from day one, no, yes, we're keeping daily room clean. We're going to reopen our restaurants. We're going to put our valleys back. If you've been to Kahala, you know they need valleys. And so some hotels have broken the ranks. Alamona hotels agreed with us to do that. Plays like Royal Conan never stopped daily room cleaning. This is a small place. So it's the big corporate hotels that are seeking to change the paradigm of tourism to their benefit and our detriment. Well, you see, it strikes me that over the years, you've seen this in closer detail than I, but over the years, all our hotels have migrated offshore. What I mean is the owners one by one have become offshore owners. And they're very remote. And matter of fact, most of them are REITs, right? And they don't have the same kind of sensibilities about Hawaii and the people and the brand that you've been discussing. It would be different, would it not, Eric, if we had local owners, wouldn't it be different? It used to be, we used to have local owners. Then, you know, Outrigger was the last and they were no longer, right, KSL, but Outrigger, the Kellys are gone. It's not a, it's not a Hawaii company at all anymore. And, you know, that's been true across the industry. So I think you're exactly right. I mean, a local owner would see a long-term benefit in maintaining the value of this place as a resort destination. These guys, they're gonna sell these hotels. You know, they buy and sell. That's what they do. And that's the reason they're in this boat. They've been buying and selling to each other, just jacking the price up for 20 years. And now the guys who are holding the note now are the ones stuck, right? When the music stopped in the musical chairs and they're standing up. So they're wanting to make their nut now. They took all the profits now, right? You know, Marriott took all the money they got on the tax bill in 2017. They put it in their pocket. They put it in executive compensation. They didn't do anything to build the economy with it. These guys have taken every profit they can. But when it's time to pay up, they want us to pay. Yeah, well, you know, it strikes me that, tell me if you agree is that they could be very profitable anyway. In other words, if they did everyday room cleaning, if they hired more people, if they returned to the level of care and comfort that used to be right here, they would still be profitable. But exactly, and they were. In 2019 and 2018 and 2017, Hawaii was always at the, one of the, either it was us or New York City at the highest rev par, rev par is revenue for available room. That's how they judge the profitability of a hotel. And we've always been in top two for the last decade or more and always in the top three or five forever. Hawaii is a very lucrative place to operate a hotel. We don't have a down season like Chicago. There's nobody in Chicago between November and March. We don't have that. We're a year round full destination. They make a pile of money here. And that's why there's been so much capital coming in here to build hotels. And we're still seeing it, right? They're still permitting hotels along the Capilani corridor. Okay. Yesterday, Eric, we had a show with Roger Epstein. He's a tax lawyer, okay? And he was talking about why the system, I know you'll agree with this, why the system around hotels is broken in Hawaii. Because we give them the hotels an environment that is world-class. We give them the weather. We give them a beautiful environment in all ways. We make it so easy. Easier than most places, the 99% of the places in the world, we give them that and they don't pay for it. And he was referring specifically to the tax on REITs. REITs are, you must be familiar with this issue. It's a pass-through. So the owners of the REIT are on the mainland and they do not pay taxes. And so the hotels are not treated like ordinary business corporations in Hawaii. And they don't pay taxes like ordinary business corporations in Hawaii. Now, you would probably tend to forget that if it wasn't the fact that they are capitalizing on the environment. They're capitalizing on the special aloha, the special weather and greenery and so forth in Hawaii. They're not paying the freight. They're letting everyone else pay the freight. And we are a community that's been extraordinarily welcoming, right? Our beaches are public beaches. In California, you pay to go to the beach, right? These are all things that we in Hawaii have to offer and have attracted people from all over the world. And that's what is getting deteriorated. So, but the REITs are, these are REITs under tax law, have a tax break and they're not supposed to get involved with employment issues. They're not supposed to bargain contracts. They're not supposed to be parties at the table. Today they are. They are being activists. They're demanding the management companies make these cuts and management companies have some independence in their interests. But basically if they don't do what they're told then the owners can get rid of the management company find somebody else. And so they could easily put in a franchise operation, for example, and a franchise cuts a Marriott or a Hyatt or a Hilton operating company out of the mix. So the owners are driving this thing and some of the big owners like Park are REITs. And it is absolutely against the law for them to do that. They're not involved themselves in labor negotiations, much less saying, we demand that you get a 20% cut in payroll. Is this all in that arbitration? You were talking about it. If you win that arbitration, is this gonna fix the problem? No, I have to arbitrate this case against each company. So we've got dozens of arbitrations signed up more than we can handle and the fact is I shouldn't be having to arbitrate plain language. It's not just the daily room cleaning. They got managers doing our work all along. That's section 1.2. You cannot do the union work. They are pushing the envelope purposely to see how far they can cut before we are able to mount an effective defense. Oh, it sounds like they're taking the COVID phenomenon, the COVID crisis and making an opportunity out of it. That's opportunism, opportunistic. And when the smoke clears, they've managed to cut the payroll, not because of COVID, but as a cover. That's what I hear you saying. Yeah, and it's not the first time. We had a 10% total reduction in work hours after 9-11. Never got those back. And getting around to 2020, now they're taking another 20, 30% off the top. But don't you have the countervailing power? I mean, I know in COVID, you were having trouble paying benefits because it was such extraordinary loss for the union but to have all the people out of work at the same time. But query, as we return, it's hard to say this, but as we turn to more of a normal situation, don't you have countervailing marketplace powers? Well, you can say to them, you guys, you got to play it right. If you don't play it fair, you won't have anybody at all working in the hotels. Can't you say that? Well, we can strike, but I can't strike them till next summer because we have a contract enforced. We can't strike till the end of the contract. And they're taking advantage of that fact. We do have some hotels that could strike. Those aren't generally the bad players. The smaller hotels that we didn't get finished last year because everything fell apart. So we can strike some people, but we can't strike the big players at this point. We could boycott them, which is a lot of work. And especially when you talk about individual travelers, it's difficult to get the message to them. We are communicating to guests every day. We have teams out on the beaches with flyers. We're getting the guests. The guests 99% agree with us. We want to get our room cleaned. And they are requesting room cleaning. So, you know, we've been fairly successful in some hotels getting the daily room cleaning rates up, not because the company, but because we organize the guests to demand that. Our quiver of arrows is not that expensive. You know, extensive. I can file grievances on them. And we filed dozens and dozens of grievances. It takes six months to get a hearing. And one doesn't know what the arbitrator is going to do on these things. And so what they're doing is they're just dragging it out. If they get a good arbitration decision, then I'm screwed for another six months at least. We already had an arbitrator say it was okay, you know, to not feed our people. We have a contract saying you got to provide food. And they weren't feeding people and the arbitrator said, well, you know, we contract says that, but because of the mandate enforced, this was back in April or whenever we filed it, you know, the company off the hook. So our decision, we need the government to step up here. Other governments have done this. San Francisco. Let's talk about that. You're talking about the state government, right? The state of Hawaii. And city. We've asked the city, we've asked every level and nobody's doing anything. What have you asked them for specifically in terms of relief? Well, last year we pushed hard for recall legislation. We wanted the government to say, you have to bring the people back to work that you laid off. And many hotels haven't done that. They didn't bring back the people. They've subbed it out. They brought back fewer people. They brought back different people. They brought back people for less. This is happening right in front of us. All the non-union places, they're able to do that and they're doing it. And so that piece of the industry is already dribbling out behind us. But we wanted recall rights. We wanted a bunch of safety stuff as well. And we wanted them to mandate daily housecleaning because that is the biggest job creator, the one toggle. And that's something you can put your finger on and enforce. It's not like a restaurant. You might have 100 people for dinner tonight and 50 tomorrow in housekeeping. You know who's checked in. You know how many rooms you're gonna clean. You can figure out how many people it is. We wanted them to do that. Nobody would do anything. We talked to the legislature, you know, three sessions, right? Since the start of the pandemic. And nothing came out, nothing came out from them. We talked to the governor. The only thing the governor did of the things that we've requested is he did take our suggestion to make them post their safety protocols publicly so they could be enforced. And but that hasn't been enforced. Many of them didn't even do that. And so unlike San Francisco where the board of supervisors early on put a mandate in for the pandemic but they've since made it a permanent mandate requiring daily room cleaning in San Francisco hotels. And they've done that. The Nevada legislature passed a much more sweeping law. We've other jurisdictions have done recall rights. And those jurisdictions are, you know, hotels are an important employer in every place. But not like here, this is what we got. This is the engine of the economy. And the government has really not seen fit to encourage other sectors. So that's kind of in a left-handed way, good news for the hotel industry because there's no competing sector. We are relying on as we have for the past 50 years, tourism. That's what we got. And we really have to make it the best tourism of the world. Yeah. And so the, so the legislature, you know, if you look at what they've done, you know, they've taxed workers on employment to give that tax money to the employer. So they didn't have to replenish the unemployment fund. They, you know, this is what the government has done. Fight over the carers money and not even put it where it needs to be. But they didn't do anything to get ahead of this problem. Even though, Jake, I had the same conversation a year ago. Well, that's the thing. And you've been asking for the continued extension of unemployment benefits, right? What kind of response you get on that one? Well, has anybody said they're going to do that? I mean, the fact of the matter is, you know, they could call a special session and do something there, but they're not. Are they going to do something in the legislative session coming up? I wonder. There's no, you know, and the way that this legislature works, doesn't really matter what you testify on a bill, they got to replace it with another bill in past that. And so you can't even impact them because they're making decisions out of the public eye behind the scenes and just pushing it out. And so we have a extraordinarily bad legislative leadership in my view. And, you know, I've had great sympathy for the governor having to deal with all this stuff. He's been cautious. You know, there's many things he didn't do, but, you know, overall, we came through this pandemic much better than many other communities. But he has not been proactive about defending the future of our industry here or making sure that we have the tax base and the employment base to provide the basic economic so that we can develop other opportunities for. Well, paint me a picture of the future, Eric, really. It's like out of Dickens and the Christmas Carol. It's what happens if things continue the same way. I mean, I'm thinking that the one weapon, if you will, that you have in your arsenal is a strike at the end of these big hotel contracts. But that's not so easy to do. You have to have reserves for that. You have to have public support for that. Not clear that would solve the problem. So let's look at the Christmas future part of this. Suppose nothing happens. Suppose the city doesn't do anything. Suppose the legislative state legislator doesn't do anything. And it's all pretty much the same. And we'll be in COVID for a while. And the hotel guys and the REITs, you know, they'll continue this strategy because they like a big bottom line. They like to spin the hotels. It works well for them. What happens to the industry? What happens to you and your members? What happens to Hawaii? Paint me a picture of the future, Eric. Yeah, I mean, the basic problem that Hawaii hotel workers have is we don't have enough of them in the union. So I can definitely defend the workers we represent. But in the places that are represented by nobody or by the longshoremen, I have no way to affect that. And so the problem is, you know, we got one third of the grip on the problem. And so we're not able just to drive things directly. What we need is we need the government to take this seriously. The immediate issue is people don't have medical and they don't have unemployment now. And they're laid off again. And they can't get unemployment now because you can get it, but it's based on your income for the last year and nobody was working. So what are you going to do? Get 75 bucks a week and feed your family on that. And what that's going to do is it's going to put a huge amount of new privation and suffering into our communities. And right at the wrong time when, you know, we're also being faced, you know, the crowded conditions there and a pandemic hitting working people disproportionately, you know, hitting Hawaiians and, you know, Micronesians and Filipinos and people of color, you know, disproportionately, not least because everybody's living in very crowded situations, right? Where it transmits easily. And so what's going to happen here is that the social divisions in Hawaii will get more intense. You know, the rich are going to be richer and, you know, they're asking people to come in, right? The state's over there saying, come down, you're going to work for a home. Why not work from here? We're going to have wealthy people coming in. We are already. And the working people got nowhere to go. But why don't they just leave? Are they leaving? Why don't they just leave? Well, where are they going to go? I mean, at the end of the day, I just, you know, we just had my international meeting in Vegas. They got the same problem there. They got thousands of people on the bench and that place is busy. And, you know, so, you know, people are going to have to go outside and find jobs somewhere else. And, you know, and that's, you know, moving your whole family and all that. And you lose them. The workforce that is, that expresses aloha to tourism that gives us the brand, their risk of disappearing, huh? Well, yeah, and it's, and it's not just that. Obviously, you know, even people that are annoyed by too many tourists, everybody's got an auntie that loves their hotel job, right? And, you know, if that auntie's laid off, now what you got? Now you got annoying tourists and no job. And that's the prospect coming up where, you know, Hawaii's people will get less and less of a bang for the buck in terms of our investment in tourism. The exploitation will increase. People's poverty will increase. People's desperation will increase. As you say, people will be forced to out migrate, you know, give up the idea of owning a home or raising a family here. All those things are terrible social effects for our community. And, you know, that's easy for them to say, just move. Well, the Hilton in San Francisco ain't employing you either. So, you know, where are you gonna go? And, you know, even if everybody moves, what does that do? So, what are we gonna replace our local people with rich people self-employed? Is that the future we want? Yeah. Well, you haven't made me feel much better about this, I have to say. And I wonder if you take a moment, Eric, Gil, will you please and leave a message with our viewing public? What would you like them to take away from this conversation? Look, I mean, we have a, we're at a crucial turning point. And I've been talking about the dangers here. And the optimism is there too, because the fact of the matter is the hotels are doing this because the situation got pandemic shook up, right? It's like a, you know, it's like 52 remakes, right? The cars all of that spread all over the table. That provides opportunities too. And you can see some of those that developed in that pandemic, right? I was really encouraged to see, for example, how farmers and farm to table and how local people really did. I mean, my members, as soon as they got laid off, they started planting stuff. You know, three months later, they're selling tomatoes on the internet. You know, we have always needed a strong agricultural center in our islands. You know, we don't have enough food to feed ourselves, not to mention that millions of tourists were inviting. So I think this situation also provides the crucial opportunity to reboot. Let's really rethink this. Let's think it over. What kind of tourism do we need? And how much tourism should we have? And what controls should we place on that? But in order to do that, we also have to provide other employment. I got thousands of members who are skilled farmers, right? They come from countries and that's what they do. And, you know, we need people to grow food. And I'm conscious that, you know, a country like Holland, for example, has been able to organize their farmers. Their farmers make good money. And it's a job people want. And, you know, we can do that if we organize our agricultural production and make it so that the brokers don't slaughter the farmers on the prices. You know, the farmers need to keep their prices and people need food at a cheap price. And we can do that. We can create employment. We can put people on to the land and do that stuff. We've got all these land is out there. Look at all the plantation land still undeveloped. And so there's some possibilities in the past that we could do, you know, King Kamehameha IV and V. Their policy was homestead land to people coming off the plantations. Not Hawaiians, everybody. So they developed a whole agricultural economy from scratch after all the Hawaiians, you know, Hawaiian farmers were killed, right, in the diseases. The kings repopulated the land. They put people back there. It created a new economy here. And they were very forward-thinking. And yet now, what do you have to do? Do you know what it takes to get a farm going? Huh! You know, it's just really difficult. And, you know, and then how do you sell your goods and all that? You know, the state needs to take, you know, some real action. And, you know, I've been through my life. I've heard the Kohala project, you know, we've seen the fish ponds up in Kohoku, all these ideas of different industries. And, you know, we can all say great, you know, but none of them worked out to create substantial employment. But historically, Hawaiians always had agriculture. And in my dad's day, they brought tourism into diversify, right? So that people had more opportunities beyond the two-crop plantation economy. And that worked, right? We have a lot more opportunities now. But now what happens? Now we've got no agriculture economy. Now our plantations have left. And, you know, we're not self-reliant. So some of these things are basic and simple. You know, we don't have to think of all kind of new industries. We can do what we're good at. But somebody got to lead that. And the state and the governments have to provide the conditions that people can do those things. Now I don't think that means we don't look for other industries. But, you know, I've been, I remember living on the Big Island when, you know, Mofi and the Seabroo guys were pushing for the spaceport. You know, let's put a spaceport down there. And, you know, I remember REOC going into tech parks. You know, let's get tech industry going, everybody wants tech industry. Well, we don't have Caltech. We don't have MIT. We don't have that. You know, we, they're not going to do that. The tech companies aren't going to do that here. And, you know, it might be a good place to shoot off rockets, but... Well, we got to focus on what we do best. And that is hospitality. And we have to protect our workforce and hospitality. And we have to be more sympathetic to the people who have lost their jobs or who might lose their jobs now. Yeah, and we got to take down on the vacation rentals. That is really true. That's what's turning people against tourism. You know, and I think the hotels are getting caught up unfairly in that. You know, even the legislature just slapping on the tourist tax. Let's let the counties do some more. You know, let's jack it up. You know, they just see it as a cash cow, but they're not looking close enough to actually feed the cash cow what it needs to eat. We're out of time, Eric. Eric Gill, Local 5. Thank you for updating us on the whole condition of the hotel workforce. We really appreciate knowing about it because it affects every single one of us. Thank you, Eric. Thanks, Jay. It's important that people hear this and I appreciate the ability to communicate through you. So thank you for that. Aloha.