Asbestos Removal Becomes Issue in Hotel Union Drive

The way asbestos is removed has become a central issue in a campaign to unionize more than 400 workers at the New Yorker Hotel, at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Officials with the New York Hotel Trades Council, the umbrella group representing 25,000 unionized city hotel workers, said they began an organizing drive at the New Yorker after workers there complained to them about wages and about having to remove asbestos without adequate equipment.

The hotel council, which represents workers from nine unions, announced the organizing drive yesterday, after working for several months to help create a 62-member organizing council made up of rank-and-file workers.

Several workers interviewed said they had to carry out plumbing repairs or renovation work that included ripping out asbestos, a known carcinogen, without the customary precautions like wearing protective suits and sealing off rooms to prevent the asbestos from circulating in the air. These workers talked of asbestos hanging from torn out walls and ceilings and of transporting asbestos around the hotel in open garbage containers.

''I think asbestos is an illustration of how much contempt for the work force the present management has,'' said Peter Ward, president of the hotel council.

Barry Mann, the general manager of the hotel said the union was distorting the truth about the asbestos situation to rally workers to the union banner. He asserted that the hotel, which has 890 rooms, has handled and disposed of the asbestos properly, adding that an old hotel like the New Yorker could be expected to have asbestos as insulation.

''The union has made a lot of false representations, which we think is basically a scare tactic,'' Mr. Mann said. He added that the hotel, which is owned by the Unification Church, had trained three workers to handle asbestos properly.

James Moss, a lawyer for the union, said he went to the United States Attorney in Manhattan on Monday to provide evidence seeking to show that the hotel's handling of asbestos violated Federal environmental and workplace laws.

Willie Rivera, a plumbing technician, said that dozens of times during the last two years managers have asked him to make plumbing repairs that have required him to tear asbestos away from pipes. He said that he often had to make such repairs and move asbestos around, without a protective suit or mask.

Notwithstanding laws requiring careful disposal of asbestos, Mr. Rivera gave the following description of the procedure: ''We'd just rip the asbestos off the pipes with our hands and then it would just fly into the air. Then we threw it away like regular garbage.''

Mr. Rivera said he believed a union would help the workers obtain a safer workplace and would help push up wages and stop what workers said were arbitrary firings.

Union officials say that about 85 percent of the workers at New York's major hotels belong to unions. These officials said that they wanted to make sure the unionization rate does not fall below that percentage because then nonunion hotels might be able to force down wages and the quality of working conditions.

Jim Donovan, the hotel council's organizing director, said that once the union got more than half the workers to sign cards saying they favor unionization, the union would ask hotel management to grant union recognition. He said if management refuses such recognition, then the union would demand an election in which it would win the right to represent the workers if it gained more than half the votes.

Mr. Mann said the union was exaggerating how much support it had. ''I get a feeling most employees are not in favor of the union,'' he said.

Several New Yorker maids said they earn about $10.50 an hour, compared with $15.75 for maids at unionized New York hotels. Mr. Mann said the hotel's staff would receive a $1 an hour raise every six months over the next few years.