 I'll have the three o'clock show on a given Wednesday. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech and it's Community Matters. And we're getting an update today from Eric Gill. What are we updating on? Well, it's how the coronavirus is impacting local five and the hotels. Hi, Eric. Nice to see you. Aloha. So let me ask the title question. How is coronavirus update? How is it? Give us an update on how coronavirus is affecting local five and the hotels. Well, the hotels are closed. People aren't working. We're running out of money to continue their medical. The federal government hasn't replaced the $600 that was there for them until the end of July, I believe. And so people are starting to get a lot more worried as they should be. And it doesn't appear that the hotels will reopen in a substantial fashion for the rest of the year so far. It just doesn't look like there's much possibility that most of these hotels will reopen this year. So obviously, that means by the end of this year, many of our members, thousands of them, will have been out of work since March. And obviously, we have many families who are both spouses and are working in the industry. And so the suffering of hospitality workers and our members being an important piece of that is going to get a lot worse as time goes on, as these benefits run out. Congress hasn't seen fit to extend any benefits. They've certainly passed out trillions of dollars to corporations that don't need it. But they are being exceedingly stingy in terms of taking care of the people out of work through no fault of their own. The state has also not stepped up to the plate in terms of providing relief. There may or may not be. Anyway, I heard that they may make a deal on this extra 300 that is doubtful legally from the president's executive order. But nobody has stepped up to the plate to cover people's medical coverage. And so that is, of course, a huge concern to our members. We've got members my age and older who are needing their medications. We've got many younger members with kids and families and a terrible situation for people not knowing what their future may be like and having their plans basically destroyed and their security is undermined. So, of course, our people are getting a lot more nervous now as the stopgap measures were put in to give them some support. Those are running out and haven't been replaced yet. You know, I saw today in the newspaper a report of a new organization that had been formed among some heavyweight business people in Honolulu, including Mark Mugeishi, Peter Ho, a few others. And it was supposed to raise some money and deal with COVID. I don't know at what level, whether it's the hotel workers or not, but they had raised initially a million dollars. And I don't know if a million dollars goes very far anyway in this context. Have you heard anything about that? Well, I've heard different organizations have formed to try to address stuff. I've been involved with a bunch of doctors that have been working really hard. I mean, hundreds of emails back and forth and very intelligent-learning people have been trying to give recommendations to the state. And there's many other groups, including us, that have been trying to do the same. So the question is, is anyone listening in the government? A million dollars just to put it in scale, our furloughed members cost about $7 million a month to insure them. And that's the lowest rate you're likely to find. But that's just medical. That's the Health and Welfare program. It's medical dental. It's the whole package. But that's below market because we're self-insured. We're only paying claims. And so most of the insured population that have coverage on employer plans that are monthly in nature and you buy a premium. In those cases, there is no break. The insurers have not given a break to their customers in terms of passing on some of the savings they've had. HMSA and Kaiser have had windfalls this year because their premiums remain the same. But the services that they are extending is far more constricted since many of those services have been withheld or canceled or postponed during this down situation. And so it's bad out there. We've got members and there are many others in the hospitality industry whose insurance expired at the end of May or the end of June. And the actual fact is that these people really have few places to go for insurance at this point. And they'll end up on state plans primarily. And again, you pay more now or you pay more later. I mean, those plans made subsidies on the state from the state to operate. Yeah. The last time we met, I remember this because it scorched its way into my brain. You had been trying to reach the hotels, the hotel owners, and try to cut a deal with them or get them to help out that you had been singularly unsuccessful in getting a response. Has that changed? No, sadly it has not. We've been pressuring the hotels from day one. And to be clear, not all of our members have been laid off. There are a few members still working in all the hotels because they have to keep up equipment and so on and so forth. And so the employers have not only not been willing to share their actual detailed protocols and procedures but have concealed them and have basically told us in a couple of cases they're not going to give it to them as, oh, they consider them proprietary. And I don't know what use of safety regulation is if it's secret. And so this is a real problem. And since the last time we talked, we have been asking again and again for an opportunity to bargain over these things, to show us what you got and we want to talk to you about it. And they have refused to do either. What hotels have done, as opposed to send us the stuff we're asking for, which are the details, is send us these puff pieces where it's basically PR pieces saying what a good job they're going to do staying safe. But they won't say exactly how. They don't say how a housekeeper is to clean those rooms, how is that person to be protected, garbed up, and say they'll be given PPE, first up to the equipment. And of course they will be, the question is are they going to be given enough PPE or are they going to be appropriate PPE? And those things nobody knows because they won't say. So it's just been very frustrating that the employers have been so cavalier in their disregard for employee safety that they just refuse to engage about it. Well, it sounds like these puff pieces are puff pieces addressed at potential guests rather than at workers, am I right? Well, government, for example, one of our former mayors was out there, you know, on behalf of the Lodging and Tourism Association, which is a group of bosses, basically. These are tourism bosses. There's no workers there, no unions there. And so he's been telling all the government guys, oh, you don't have to worry, we got it. And so they trot out these fancy pieces. And, but it doesn't have any detail in it. You know, and it's really almost useless in terms of determining what workers will do on a day-to-day basis to stay safe. And there's a lot of detail, I think we went into some of that last time, but the way we work in the back of the house is people are close together when they work. You know, we have tight briefings for housekeepers. We cram onto elevators with wagons. We do that every day. And if we keep doing that, we're not being safe, but they won't say anything about elevator social distancing in particular. And what needs to be done is we need to have those things. And the workers in those departments have to have those protocols and have to go and discuss with management. How are we going to do this? How are we going to hold our briefing? Where are we going to do it? Where we don't have to be sitting on each other's lap? How are we going to do the elevators so we don't have to crowd in there? How about the locker rooms? You know, there's big crowds in there, every shift change, you know. And, you know, those things need to be addressed in detail, linen shoots, linen gathering policies. You know, the amount of time you let a room sit before you clean it. Do you vacuum a carpet when it hasn't yet been treated and may have COVID droplets on it? All those things need to be addressed in order for people to work safely. And none of them are being addressed because they're all basically saying, oh, we're still working on it. We want to work on it with them. And our people want to know, when I go to work, how am I going to be safe? And when I go to home to my aged mom or my preschool kids, how am I going to keep them safe? And those questions remain empirically unanswered and also all our appeals to actually put some money in to help people stay covered. Yeah, okay. I see there's three sides to it. The first side, of course, is the hotel safe for the workers. Second is the hotel safe for the guests because if it's not safe for the guests, it can't be safe for the workers. And if it's not safe for the workers, it can't be safe for the guests. And furthermore, I guess both the guests and the hotels have to have a safe place at home from whence they came because otherwise they bring COVID to the hotel. It's sort of like a ship, isn't it? There's a lot of places, a lot of holes in the boat here and you have to seal them all. Right, and there's nobody safe if everybody's not safe. All it takes is one unattended positive case and you could have a big bloom there and that's what has been happening. And the blooms that we've seen in Hawaii haven't come from guests, haven't come from visitors. You know, we had an outbreak in one hotel. The workers involved never don't see the guests. We've had an outbreak in a nursing home. That didn't come in from a visitor. There's no tourists ever step foot in that building. And so the notion that we should just focus on the guests is being driven by the media and by the company because that's the easiest thing for them to do is put up signs in the lobby that they ignore and require to guess where masks, which they ignore. And from our point of view, if a worker's working there, we're required to wear masks and properly sew, right? The mask contains your breath. It stops you from spreading it to someone else. If the guest is breathing in our face, that mask doesn't do us any good. They are now breathing their stuff out into the air. It's going all around. And in every hotel we're looking at, many of them have signs saying guests must wear masks. And even, you know, we go to the lobby, we look, they're not and there's nobody making them do it. And so, you know, this is stuff that the hotels aren't good at. You know, telling guests they can't do something. They're not good at that. Eric, what's the status of the quarantine thing for hotels and guests? I really must say it's changed so much. I can't say what it is right now. What is it right now? Well, there are several hotels apparently and this is all being done pretty quietly because I haven't seen anything published as to it. And I certainly haven't been offered the opportunity to go look, but there are some hotels that apparently the city has located that are be willing to take quarantine people. And that's an urgent need for our people here in Hawaii. You know, many of us live in large homes, multi-families, plenty of people. You know, if somebody tests positive, we need a place to go and can't just stay on a beach now, you get arrested to do that. And so there needs to be a place to quarantine, but the state hasn't done from what I can see. And again, the state and the city are apparently cooperating in terms of finding and operating these hotels. None of them are under our contract, so we can't just go look. But I'm quite certain when we go look that we will find planning stuff that needs to be done that hasn't been done in those places. What we have been asking for the government to do is require them to post their procedures publicly so that we will all know they have them so that we can all go and look at them. And so that those of us who have an opinion about them can say something about them, but mostly that they say they have them, but they don't post them anywhere. So what use is a safety rule? We have serious issues about transparency in general in Hawaii as a failure. But let me ask you about your new website, which actually I just saw a press release today a couple of hours ago, as a matter of fact, about let's get it right the first time. Can you talk about your new website that covers that and how and why and what I can learn from it? Yeah, look, and we have to be very careful here because obviously we're talking about, businesses, we have to be careful, right? But we started a website out of frustration. This is something that the government should be doing. The government should be setting a high standard for safety and should be able to report whether they're meeting that standard or not. And unfortunately, despite our many urgings, the government hasn't done anything of the sort, not even required them to post their measures, much less provide any information about whether those measures are actually being implemented or not. And so we are trying to jump into the vacuum. And as private sector people, we recognize this is a need that hotels need an incentive to spend the money to be safe because they're not making a lot of money, they don't wanna spend a lot of money. And safety does cost money. If we're gonna have fewer people in the elevator, that means more time waiting for elevators, right? That's productive time people are sitting there waiting for an elevator. Those are things we didn't think to work on. So what we're doing is we've trained our people and we're continuing to train them. We've got some people that are pretty good about inspections now. They can go in and see the back of the house and they can see what's been done and what's not been done. And so we're, we are basically given this website to show people the results of those inspections. So we're inspecting union hotels where we do have access to the back of the house. We're also going and checking on non-union hotels. They'll give us some trouble going back to where workers work because that's where they're not doing what they're supposed to be. But even in the lobbies you can see, you know, we go to one hotel and it's supposed to be six feet social distancing and it's not, you know, all the guests are crowded around the pool and, you know, it's capitalism in action in our industry. You know, the hotels that are taking quarantine guests don't want it to be publicized and they certainly don't want to expose to the public what they're doing or not doing for people's safety. I think it's dangerous, but look, we're doing the best we can to fill in the gap. We're creating a tool so traveling public can look and see and have a credible report from people that know what they're talking about about whether or not the safety measures that are supposed to be in place are actually being followed and what they are and so on. And so we're, you know, we'll get better and better at this. We launched a website after, you know, couple months of inspections. So we've gathered enough information to start and we're doing more inspections every week. And we're certainly going to be looking at all hotels, not just union hotels. I believe that the union hotels are not sufficiently prepared. I also believe they're going to be a lot more prepared than the ones that don't have a union and somebody like me poking at them to make sure. Well, I think it's really valuable what you're doing in something the government, as you say, should have done. I looked at it briefly, you notice you had photographs and reports there. Very valuable for somebody who's trying to make a choice about what hotel to stay in and how the hotels are doing and what they're doing. And very valuable. I'm glad you did that. I think a lot of people will be happy that you did that. Well, we think the industry should embrace this. I mean, the truth of the matter is at least for the next period, months, possibly years, you're going to have a very safety conscious traveling public, people who want to have assurances. And I think Hawaii's already bobbled the ball by letting this latest surge get loose and not doing what we needed to do when we came out of the lockdown the first time. So we had an opportunity to be the world's safest place to go and that's not true anymore. To get back that opportunity would take a lot of work and be hard on our local community. Meaning they'd have to actually start doing a lot of the stuff they haven't been doing. We've seen big tests going on now. It's like the horse out of the barn, but better late than never. But the fact is we needed to come out of the last lockdown with big tests, be able to identify particular blooms due to contact tracing, the testing that's necessary to quarantine, to stop down that outbreak. So it doesn't get out. At this point it's kind of out and about. And so nonetheless, I think that's even more so that guests will want to know where to go to find out some independent information that isn't just from the company that can tell you what you wanna hear, but actual credible information about actual safety measures. And so we think that we're actually leading away for the industry. The industry needs to embrace this fact that the guests of this next period are gonna be very safety conscious. They're gonna be very interested in what's being done to ensure their safety. And we should be catering to our market. No, we should be leaders. As you say, Hawaii can lead the way. We're not inexperienced at running hotels. And I'm reminded of these ads that you see over and over again while you're trying to watch escape movies on Netflix about these hotels, for example, in the Caribbean, oh, they're beautiful. They're romantic. It's perfect. But what about, you know, what about COVID there? They don't talk about it. And I think it's, to me, it's a metric. I wouldn't consider going to any destination without having some assurance that it was under control and that there are steps being taken and it was relatively, relatively, because it's never perfect, relatively safe. Well, it's also the point. The point is right there. You know, if it's out and about in the community and it hasn't been adequately contained, the community walks in the back door to go to work or they walk in the delivery entrance to bring supplies or there's people in and out all the time. And unless you can control the rate of infection in the community, then that increases the possibility of likelihood that somebody's going to walk in the back door with it. So all these people that are concentrating only on testing the gas and then arriving passengers, okay, that's important, right? We shouldn't be importing any more COVID. But they're not addressing the same issue. They need to test workers too. And unless they do, unless there's some gate, you know, that they can try to lock the COVID out from walking in, just walking in because it's out. Well, there are a number of organizations that are trying to develop a spit in a cup test. One of them is Ocean Adhere locally. I don't know if they have FDA approval yet, but if they do get FDA approval, it'll probably be before a vaccine because the vaccine is still, in my view, pie in the sky, especially now in view of this group of pharma companies that said, hey, we're not rushing. That was yesterday in the news, but I'm thinking that if we had a spit in the cup test we could get for five bucks, you could get a five or 10 minute result. You could use that everywhere and you could control the given property, you know, to a very fine tolerance. So what would the union's position on that be? To have every worker do a spit in a cup test every time or every other time, whatever the case may be, in order to make, to give some confidence to the community of the hotels, the tourist industry, that we were screening out all the cases. Yeah, I think the testing obviously is a rapidly evolving field, right? And there's a lot of controversy about tests and, you know, that's, you've all heard what the health department has said over the years, wow, it's only a snapshot, you know, you could get sick tomorrow and all those things are true. But one of the, you know, but it's also true that it's one of the few tools we have. And if we don't use it, we're not using any tools. You know, testing and contact tracing is what you can do to kind of suppress the outbreak going general. Once it goes general, all you can do is lock down and that's where we're at. But locked down, nobody's going to come here. We're not going to want anybody to come here. But we've got to ask ourselves really, you know, I mean, you know, the industry keeps saying, we need a date, we need a date. Well, I can tell you some of the reasons why they're all panicked is has nothing to do with COVID other than the money of it. But the fact is, you know, what are we trying to do? We're trying to open our tourism to bring people from where? You know, New York, all the people from California coming in, that's our biggest market. Yeah, no, New York won't let them in. We're going to say, come on down, really. And who are we going to get? You know, we get the bargain basement people and those people who aren't concerned about safety. And those are the people we don't want. You know, we would rather have, as a community, wouldn't we rather have people with money that's going to spend some money here and are concerned about safety because their safety is our safety. But I can tell you what the hotels are really worried about. The ownership of these hotels, they're all these big private investment, private equity investment firms, REITs, you know, the big REIT that just bought the Hilton Village and took all the Hilton, all these acquisitions are heavily leveraged financially. In other words, what they've done, the hotel owners over the last 20 years has been build a bubble, a speculative real estate bubble in commercial real estate in the lodging sector. It's very similar in how it works to the bubble that was built in the private residential center 10 years ago. And basically, these are loan backed, you know, bond backed instruments that get packaged and repackaged. So your mortgage loan will be at the core here, that'll be sold on a secondary market, repackaged with a bunch of others, selling shares of that and those shares are bought by other mutual funds and so on. And so this whole leverage has been based on these initial notes. And the initial notes have all been based on the cash flow, not on the value of the property. So what's happening here is they've jacked up the price of these hotels as they bought and sold and they took all their margin each time and stripped the cash out of the company. And now they can't pay. So you've now had two quarters of non-performing notes, you know, April, May and June, June, July, August and September. At the end of September, there'll be two quarters of big bonds that have not had a penny paid to them. And that's going to be a big shakeup when those bonds start to drop into the market. They'll get downgraded and dropped in financial institutions, holding bonds that get downgraded, may have to dump them. And what's going to happen is the biggest, most richest companies who accumulated the most money, they call it dry powder, are going to buy up the weak sisters and that's what's going on among the owners. That's why they don't care about our safety. They're all soaring up their cash to defend off a hostile bid or to buy up the next one that falters. So what's happening here is this COVID thing is screening and masking what is a big economic fallout that's based on an investment bubble that's been built up over 20 years. And these hotels can't pay those notes. They were based on 90 plus percent occupancy. They're not gonna be able to pay them. In this process, do you foresee bankruptcies among the hotels? Well, yeah, bankruptcies, foreclosures, there'll be all kind of forced sales to avoid bankruptcies. We expect to see, we'll see. I mean, the corporations are also hoping that McConnell will pass out some bills out because there's supposedly money out there to basically give some relief to these mortgage backed notes. And that'll be temporary relief anyway. But what's happening now is stock prices, bond prices, they're all gonna get shook up real bad in the next period ahead. And it's gonna be based on the fact that stock prices are being artificially held up with the expectation of trillions of dollars of my grandkids' money to be paid to corporations that's been holding up the stock price. And you're not talking about just stock prices for hotels and reeks. You're talking about stock prices for everything the entire stock market. Well, I mean, there's a lot of money invested in commercial real estate. And when money starts dropping out, all these cards start falling. So I don't know, I'm not any kind of this. Well, let me add to this though, Eric, but on the local side, it's not a pretty picture. But what happens to the workforce? What happens to your members? If we just draw a straight line without any changes, without any relief, what happens? What happens to all these people and their families that were supported have been supported by the tourism industry? What happens? What's gonna happen? People are gonna run out of money. People are gonna run out of ability to be insured. People are gonna be able to pay their rent. We're gonna have people on the street. We're gonna have people without coverage. The government hasn't done anything to create new employment. My members would, we'll do the work. We got members who wanna become medical assistants. They have experience. They need local certification. We need money to train them. We'll train them. They can go work. There's plenty of work available in healthcare right now. I don't know what this government thinks they're gonna do. Just kind of put the head in the sand and wait. You've got a quarter of a million employees, quarter of a million. And that's, you count families. We're talking about more than half of Hawaii's population are gonna be directly affected by this. That means that everyone will be directly affected if that many people are out of work without resources. They have money. They can't buy things. And then who's gonna be able to sell things? Yeah. So what do you say? What do you think about the economy in general? I mean, it's suffering now for sure. But when we reach a certain tipping point going forward, when there are no resources for that quarter million, what are your thoughts about the state of Hawaii economy? Well, I think the tax base is shot to hell. And we've explained that to the legislature. They chose to do nothing about it. And so the, but I don't know where the money for schools is gonna come from when quarter of a million people aren't working and can't pay state income tax. The state certainly can borrow. They could be borrowing right now. They could borrow several billion dollars right now. They haven't chosen to do so. But clearly there's gonna have to be some work created. We're ready to do the work. And we can do the work. We're doing it now. Our members are operating a quarantine station. We're driving people back and forth. We're picking up whatever work we can get for our members. And we'd be happy to have more. We'll fix bathrooms in public parks. We'll do conservation work. All those things need to be done. And the government's gonna have to do something. That's interesting. You paint a picture where the unions, which have been on the other side of management for many years for all of time, can be very valuable in forming public policy in setting up circumstances and situations and funding where we can recover or at least we can survive. And so this is, I mean, to hear you talk like that it means that the union should have a place at the table. Not just because you represent your members, but because you have ideas about the economy. Well, it's not only that, but I mean, if we're gonna be safe in hotels, you have to talk to the workers in their department or you're not gonna be safe. I mean, for one, they're the ones who can figure out how to do it right when we train them and they know what they do. And once we train them on the epidemiology, they can work on that and make it safe. But that needs to happen and it's not happening except in a few places where we've been able to reach an agreement with the company to do that. When we do that, it's very effective. Workers have a say in their own safety and they'll be working directly with their managers who are equally concerned about their safety. What we're gonna do is get this safety discussion out of the hands of the corporate lawyers and bean counters and all those guys and get the people that actually want to be safe working on safety. Unions absolutely have to be at the table and we're not. And in fact, whenever we manage to get into the conference room, we get this, this, this and then it's gone. So it's unfortunate, but we are doing the best we can to do what we can do with the resources we have to help drive on behalf of the people of Hawaii. Somebody got to speak up for the people of Hawaii here. And apparently it's not our government. Appreciate that, Eric. Eric Gil of Local Five, the hotel workers union, thank you so much for joining us. I hope we can check back with you as time goes by. See how, see how this further evolves. Thanks so much. I always like talking to your millions of viewers, Jay. Yeah. Me too. We take every opportunity. We want to be heard. And like I said, we're not always being heard where we need to be. So we are shouting for whatever rooftop we can get on. And thanks for offering a ladder to you. Absolutely. Aloha. Good night.