It's all part of a labor truce arranged between the two sides after the 31- month labor battle that culminated last month in the beating of a union business agent outside the hotel.
"We're trying to work everything out," said Patrick J. Coughlan, president of Local 274. "There's was a window of opportunity there."
Coughlan declined further comment. Hotel officials also would not comment.
The two sides, however, have a "neutrality agreement" not to trash each other in the press while the union attempts to recruit a majority of workers at the hotel to form a bargaining unit.
The pickets left the hotel Aug. 11, and that weekend, for the first time, business agents were allowed into the employees' cafeteria on the hotel's first floor to lobby workers.
Union pickets have demonstrated at the Holiday Inn since February 1993, when Jaworski and a group of investors bought the hotel. As a condition of the deal, 70 hotel employees were fired by the former owners, and when the Jaworski group took over, nonunion workers were hired.
Last month, about 1,500 protesters from several city unions demonstrated at the hotel to protest the beating of Edward Kirlin, 40, of South Philadelphia, who had to be treated for convulsions and heart failure. Two hotel security guards have been arrested and charged in connection with the assault on Kirlin, a business agent for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International.
At the hotel yesterday, several employees said they had been approached by the union.
Armand DiGiampietro, a bartender in the Legends sports bar, said he told the union organizers that he wasn't interested.
"I said no," he said. "The only thing they had that I don't have is a pension." As a new employee, DiGiampietro said, his "main concern is getting the good shifts" on the weekend, when the bar is most crowded.
Union organizers told DiGiampietro that he could expect regular raises under a union contract, he said, but he wasn't impressed. Bartenders, he said, don't even look at their paychecks.
"You live on tips," he said.
Other employees were more interested.
A woman named Donna who earns $6.25 as a hotel housekeeper said the union was "most definitely needed." But she said she doubts if the union will ever get to take over.
In the past few weeks, she said, four employees in her department have been fired and not replaced.
"I think they're just going to go ahead and sell the place," she said, noting that the last time the hotel changed ownership, union workers were let go.
"Why would they change their mind now?" she said.
