The Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, a Pritzker family hotel in Chicago with rooms listed at about $500 a night, hosted a Democratic Socialists of America panel on the group’s 2026 program, Workers Deserve More, on Friday. The conference has been held at this Hyatt every year since at least 2022.
Outside, UNITE HERE Local 1 hotel workers picketed in work uniforms. Signs read “No contract.”
The panel was part of Socialism 2026, a four-day conference organized by Haymarket Books at the same hotel. Organizers advertised thousands of attendees and more than 100 sessions, including discussions of Marxism.
The New York Post put attendance at more than 2,000. On-site standard tickets were $155. Rooms at the four-star hotel listed around $500 a night. DSA national co-chair Ashik Siddique and streamer Hasan Piker spoke Friday, the New York Post reported.
“Social democracy got as far as it did because there were people pushing for way more radical things with way more power in sectors of the economy and the workplaces, to show the threat of organized workers being willing to shut stuff down that blocks the profits of those capitalists,” Siddique said.
More than 7,000 union hotel workers at 46 Chicago hotels, including the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, have been working without a contract since agreements expired Monday night, Sept. 1.
Local 1 has said workers could strike at any time. The union is seeking higher wages, health benefits, retirement security, protections for immigrant workers, and limits on workloads.
DSA’s slogan was “Workers Deserve More.” The workers at the hotel were outside, without a contract.
A 2025 Local 1 survey found that 1 in 8 Chicago hotel workers reported using a food pantry in the prior 12 months and that one-third lacked money to cover housing costs in that period.
Forbes estimated the Pritzker family’s fortune at $53.2 billion as of June 29, 2026, up from $41.6 billion on the magazine’s 2024 family ranking. Those figures are Forbes estimates. Company filings describe Pritzker family business interests as holding a majority of Hyatt’s common stock and about 89% of its voting power.
Thomas J. Pritzker served as Hyatt’s executive chairman until February 2026, when he stepped down after writing that he “exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact” with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. He has not been charged.
A 2011 email he sent Epstein from Afghanistan, referring to a trip
“with Boys with Toys” and helicopters loaned by then-Gen. David Petraeus, drew wide and often harsh public reading after Justice Department file releases. The email does not define the phrase. Pritzker has not been charged in connection with it.
Workers Deserve More calls for a 32-hour workweek with no cut in pay, a living wage, paid family leave, universal health care, and, in the text’s own words, “building a new society from the ground up.”
In May 2026, New York’s Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and the Hotel Association of New York City reached an eight-year contract covering more than 27,000 workers at more than 200 hotels; nearly 250, in contemporaneous reporting.
Union officials said the deal raises wages by more than 50% over the term and puts housekeeper pay on a path above $100,000 a year by the early 2030s. Chicago talks remain unresolved.
On Friday, workers from an industry in which 1 in 8 have used a food pantry picketed the Hyatt while, inside, DSA presented Workers Deserve More.
Solidarity stopped at the lobby doors.
