Hundreds of members of the 40,000-person Hotel Trades Council showed up for the endorsement — the first union to back de Blasio’s three-week-old bid for the Democratic nomination.
“At the end of the day this is one of those really few times in recent history where average New Yorkers have won significant protections about the quality of their lives and the city they live in when the opposition was big real estate,” union president Peter Ward said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio threw his support behind expanding a land use policy dear to the city’s politically powerful hotel workers union Wednesday, as the labor organization endorsed his presidential bid in an energetic rally.
Five years into his tenure, de Blasio, who won the mayoralty without the HTC's backing in 2013, put the policy in place in manufacturing zones, over the objections of the real estate industry and some high-ranking officials in his administration.
“When he became mayor, we were facing and fighting against market forces that were so powerful it was hard to describe,” Ward said, referring to the growth of nonunion hotels. “We had this little company called Airbnb operating illegally and taking the bread off our tables.”
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