Laid-Off Times Square Marriott Workers To Get $3 Million Back, AG Says
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — A year and a half after they took to the streets to protest, hundreds of laid-off workers from the Times Square Marriott Marquis hotel will be getting millions in severance pay that they were owed, New York Attorney General Letitia James said Thursday.
The $2.95 million will go to 565 workers who were fired from the flagship Broadway hotel in March 2021, James's office said.
As Patch reported at the time, more than 1,200 hotel employees had been furloughed in March 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — including more than 800 non-union workers who were eventually told that they would never get their jobs back.
Compounding the pain of the layoffs, Marriott management revised its policies during the summer of 2020 to cap severance pay at 10 weeks' salary, according to employees. Management then replaced the employees with outsourced workers, contradicting claims that their jobs had been eliminated.
Calling the tactics "dirty," the workers staged a protest outside the hotel in December 2020 and asked state officials to intervene — eventually prompting a probe from James's office, which began investigating whether Marriott had broken labor laws.
James's office ultimately found that Marriott violated state anti-fraud laws. Under the agreement with the attorney general's office, signed last month, Marriott will repay employees who would have gotten more severance pay had they been unionized.
"Marriott fired hundreds of employees last year due to the pandemic and to add insult to injury, deprived them of the financial security they needed during that critical time,” James said in a statement.
"No individual should ever feel the hopelessness that these workers felt when Marriott failed to deliver the severance pay they were promised."
In interviews with investigators, the laid-off workers said their supervisors at the Marriott Marquis promised they would get "equal or better benefits" than unionized workers at other New York hotels — only to receive paltry severance once they were fired.
"It was a good job," Brian Richards, a 32-year server at the hotel's revolving rooftop restaurant, told Patch in 2020. "I was quite happy."
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Laid-Off Times Square Marriott Workers To Get $3 Million Back, AG Says originally appeared on the Midtown-Hell's Kitchen Patch
