A years-long battle for workers at the famed Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip has ended in victory after owner Andre Balazs and hospitality union Unite Here Local 11 announced in a joint statement Thursday that they have reached an agreement to allow employees to unionize and for normal operations to resume.
“Both the Chateau Marmont and UNITE HERE Local 11 are pleased with this new relationship,” the statement read. “We believe that it solidifies the foundation of the Chateau’s historic success: the commitment to its guests and employees, both of which are famous for their loyalty and longevity.”
Opened in 1929 as an apartment and converted to a hotel two years later, the Chateau Marmont has been one of the most famous locations in Hollywood, hosting countless big screen stars from the Golden Age to the present day. It has been name-dropped in dozens of novels and songs and seen in movies like Barbara Stanwyck’s final film “The Night Walker” and modern classics like Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born.”
Workers at the Chateau Marmont have tried for years to unionize with little progress, but their struggle made headlines within Hollywood when Balazs laid off 248 of the hotel’s employees — many of which had worked at the Marmont for decades — without any severance packages at the onset of the pandemic in 2020.
With the support of Unite Here and major Hollywood labor orgs like SAG-AFTRA and IATSE, Marmont employees staged regular protests outside the hotel over the past two years, including on Oscar night earlier this year when Jay-Z hosted an afterparty at the hotel.
Unite Here also pushed for Hollywood productions to boycott the Marmont as a production site, as countless films and TV shows have shot at the hotel for decades. Among the films successfully targeted by the labor movement was Aaron Sorkin’s Lucille Ball biopic “Being the Ricardos,” which had scheduled a shoot at the Marmont in April 2021 but cancelled hours before cameras were set to roll after sustained pressure from Marmont employees.