The Workers United Union and Cornell Organization for Labor Action were planning to protest as General Electric’s CEO was to give his keynote address in the 2009 Net Impact Conference at Cornell, but the rally was called off after COLA’s secretary Chad Gray ’10 met with General Electric’s global human resources manager and convinced G.E. to pull its employees from the Holiday Inn Express in Latham, N.Y.

Over six months ago, allegations surfaced that hotel owner Jim Morrell had illegally fired three employees for attempting to form a union. Hotel employees have been on an unfair labor practices strike ever since.

“They notified their employer of their desire to form a union and within 24 hours, half of the organizing committee was fired,” a Workers United Union press release stated Nov. 5.

Wes Hanna ’06, an organizer for the Workers United Union, explained that the union immediately called for a boycott of the hotel. G.E., however, was regularly putting up 12-20 employees per night at the Holiday Inn Express and was, “by far the [hotel’s] largest customer.”

The union contacted COLA members upon hearing that the CEO of G.E. would be speaking on Friday at Cornell’s Net Impact conference, and the two organizations decided to host a rally outside of the venue. Hanna said they were expecting about 50 to 100 protestors.

However, on Thursday evening Gray received a call from Susan Beauregard, G.E.’s global human resources manager, in response to an earlier fax COLA had sent to the company’s CEO Jeff Immelt. Gray met with Beauregard, a representative from Workers United Local 471 and one of the Holiday Inn’s employees on strike.

“[Beauregard] said G.E. thought that they had taken all of their employees out of there before,” Gray explained. “We told her that we were planning on having a large rally the next morning and she wasn’t too excited about that.” Beauregard promised to remove all of G.E.’s employees from the hotel by Friday morning as long as COLA called off its protest. COLA agreed to the compromise.

“The next day everybody who was in the hotel got all their stuff and left. It was definitely a huge victory. It shows that student activism does matter, even in a place as isolated at Ithaca,” Gray said.