Students at prominent Ivy League campuses and other universities have called on academic officials to pull HEI Hotels and Resorts investment from their endowment funds because of alleged unfair labor practices at HEI-managed hotels. The move has had mixed results.

An HEI spokesman claims no university has actually stopped investing in HEI, calling the push a mask for instituting card check at four non-union hotels it manages. Nigel Hurst, head of human resources for Norwalk, CT-based HEI, says the firm doesn’t object to unionization but won’t allow card check. (Card check is a process is which a union gains representation in a company when a simple majority of eligible workers sign authorization cards.)

A spokesperson for Hotel Workers Rising, an arm of the labor union UniteHere, says workers at those hotels want “a fair and mutual process” that allows unionization without “employer intimidation.” Annemarie Strassel says “HEI has never agreed to remain neutral” in such a case.

Nigel Hurst

In response to a late-February Student Labor Action Project demand that the University of Pennsylvania not reinvest in HEI—which Wharton MBA graduate Gary Mendell and his brother, Steve, founded in 1994—the Office of Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli issued a statement saying future consideration of “an investment would take into account all relevant circumstances at that time,” according to the Mar. 27 Daily Pennsylvanian.

Some five weeks earlier, Brown University officials issued a statement following a similar demand from that Rhode Island institution’s Student Labor Alliance. In December, the Connecticut Post reported Brown’s advisory committee on corporate responsibility began an inquiry into an HEI settlement with the National Labor Relations Board over dismissal of an employee from the Sheraton Crystal City (VA) Hotel in suburban Washington, DC. That Sheraton joins as UniteHere targets these California HEI-managed hotels: the Le Meridien in San Francisco, an Embassy Suites in Irvine and the Hilton Long Beach.

Brown has decided to refrain from reinvesting in HEI until “it is confident they adhere to our high standards regarding respectful and humane treatment of workers,” according to a statement from its ethics committee.

At Harvard University, the Student Labor Action Movement began a campaign against HEI in 2008, sparked by labor violation allegations lodged by United Students Against Sweatshops. Harvard hasn’t joined Brown or Penn, however. Neither has Yale University—or Cornell University, where HEI is enshrined on the Corporate and Foundation Hall of Fame, an honor reserved for companies that give Cornell $100,000 to $1 million. In 2007, the Mendell brothers, who are Cornell graduates, were awarded the Hospitality Innovator Award, sponsored by The Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship, according to The Cornell Daily Sun of Feb. 25. Max Schindler’s story notes Cornell holds no portfolio investments in HEI.

Other universities joining in the HEI labor dispute are Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, according to UniteHere.

While student activity over HEI remains heated, the National Labor Relations Board turned down a UniteHere effort to be bargaining representative for Hyatt hotels in California and Indiana. On Mar. 21, the NLRB rejected UniteHere petitions for employees at the Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, the Hyatt Regencies in Santa Clara and Long Beach and the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis. According to a Hyatt news release, the NLRB canceled petition review hearings after learning UniteHere was unwilling to state it represents a majority of Hyatt employees. Hyatt claims UniteHere has subjected its employees to harassment and intimidation at those four hotels.

“We have a very similar experience with UniteHere whereby in four of our 36 hotels they’ve been trying to persuade us to agree to a card check where union representatives are free to approach employees and ask them to sign a card saying they would support recognition for the union,” says HEI HR chief Hurst. “That is open to intimidation because the employee has to say yes or no, I do want to sign or I don’t want to sign, so the employee does not have a confidential choice to make, it’s a public choice to make.”

Hurst says it doesn’t object to HEI employees organizing unions by secret ballot with NLRB certification. “This is the… legal process by which unions become recognized. The point is the decision rests with the employees, not management or unions.”

While she doesn’t address the card check issue, Annemarie Strassel of UniteHere says HEI “has employed a range of techniques to bring costs down and employees have faced severe cutbacks on staffing levels. HEI reduces the hours of some workers, lays off others, and in some instances has eliminated entire job functions,” she adds, claiming some employees are doing “the job of two or three workers…there have even been basic shortages in the materials workers need to do their job.”

Strassel calls HEI “disingenuous” in saying it has no objection to unionization, claiming its “record of labor violations and other investigations by the NLRB speaks for itself in that regard.”