CONSTRUCTION workers and hotel employees are at odds over a hotel (Shutterstock).

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Dept. You’ve seen them outside your supermarket or drug store. Folks with clipboards urging you to sign petitions regarding the proposed Nickelodeon-themed hotel approved by the Garden Grove City Council recently.

What strikes me about the petition drive to put the issue on the ballot is what the petition folks don’t tell you, which is that this drive pits one union against another.

On the one hand, you have the construction trade unions who would be employed building a huge hotel complex that – incidentally – would provide good-paying jobs to workers and millions of dollars in tax revenue to the city.

On the other hand, you have the hotel and and restaurant workers union who are engaged in an ongoing battle with the hotel operators in Anaheim.

They are opposed to the new hotel in Garden Grove on the grounds that the land should be used for “affordable housing,” whatever that means in Orange County. How blocking the new hotel would accomplish that remains a mystery.

What may happen is that this situation has the potential for a lose-lose game. If the new hotel is blocked, that eliminates hundreds of union jobs and potentially creates a threat to more hospitality development in Garden Grove’s hotel district.

Why would one union want to prevent a development which would employ many members of another “brother” union?

And what advantage would be gained if they did, other than flexing their bargaining muscles in Anaheim?

I come from a union family and have been a u nion guy most of my working life. Hotel /restaurant workers, then The Newspaper Guild, followed by National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers.

Generally speaking, I believe that the labor union movement (with a few scandalous exceptions) has been a force for good.
But when one union decides that the job market is a zero-sum world in which your success is somehow my problem, that’s not good.

Not good for the unions and not good for the public.