Communists Helped Build the Mighty New York Hotel Union

The second Trump administration has been labeling political leftists as "domestic terrorists" and targeting immigrants whose beliefs it disagrees with for detention and deportation. This would not have surprised Michael J. Obermeier, the president of the Hotel, Restaurant and Club Employees and Bartenders Union Local 6, who in 1947 was arrested at his union's office for being an "undesirable alien."

Obermeier, who was born in Germany in 1892, left home as a teenager and become a steward on steamships traveling around the world. When World War I broke out, he was in England; he was banished and landed in New York, where he got a job as a waiter at the Vanderbilt Hotel and joined a union organizing effort. He spent three decades building a scrappy group of hotel workers into a powerful, militant union that still today represents more than 90 percent of hotel workers in New York.

But as the Cold War dawned, Obermeier, who had never become an American citizen, was arrested, convicted of perjury for having falsely denied being a member of the Communist Party, and deported to Germany. He died in poverty in Spain in 1960.

Obermeier's story provides a compelling through line in Shaun Richman's latest book, We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers' Union, 1912–1953, which traces the propulsive story of one of New York City's most powerful unions through world wars, Prohibition, the Depression, and into the Red Scare.

For Jacobin, Jenny Hunter spoke with Richman about how he first became interested in Obermeier while working as an organizer for Local 6, the continuity between the US government's use of deportation to punish political dissident immigrants in the Cold War and its weaponization of deportations now, and what insights his book might hold for today's labor movement.