Anyone who thinks you can be completely clueless and still successfully run a major city hotel should consider carefully the dustup over the Boston Marriott Copley Place’s $18 million renovation.

The allegations that recovering drug addicts imported from Philadelphia were paid $4 an hour – half the state’s already measly minimum wage – are sorry enough.

But the defense of the hotel’s owners – they just didn’t know what was going on with all their contractors – is just as indefensible when it comes to savvy business management in a major metro market.

And there’s definitely no room to be clueless if you opt to go the cheaper – but definitely not PC, at least not locally – route of running a non-union shop in the labofriendly Hub, as the owners of Boston’s Marriott have.

Given the disaster a few years ago that befell the Hyatt – another nonunion Boston hotel caught misbehaving – property owner Host Hotels & Resorts Inc. and Marriott management should have been on guard.
Instead, it looks like they were asleep at the switch.

Warning Signs

If you are a non-union hotel in Boston, watch your step: Some of the most aggressive, toughest and clever union activists around have you in their sights.
The black eye Hyatt gave itself three years ago, when it fired almost 100 house keepers at its three Boston-area hotels, should have been enough to keep managers at Marriott and other non-union operators on their toes. News of the firings energized Boston labor activists, including the city’s powerful hotel workers union, Local 26, which organized pickets outside Hyatt’s local hotels.

In an added twist, the workers claimed they were made to train their replacements.
The genuine plight of the hotel workers – thrown into the cold in the midst of the Great Recession – became a front-page story. Under pressure, Hyatt made some concessions, extending the workers’ health benefits and pledging to help them find jobs.

But the damage was done, with Gov. Deval Patrick jumping on the bandwagon and calling for a boycott a few months after the firings.
While local passions have cooled, the Boston story is still making the rounds, popping up in a recent story about a worldwide boycott of Hyatt hotels being pushed by union activists.

Managed by a big chain that has resisted unionization, you would think the Boston Marriott would have paid close attention to the lessons of the Hyatt fiasco. Perhaps they did and took away a simple lesson like, “hey, don’t fire the housekeepers!”
If so, it missed the point.

A spokeswoman for Marriott said the chain simply manages the hotel. Typically, on a project of this size, Host, the owner, takes charge of the renovations.
Sounds like a somewhat problematic division of labor, but that’s a subject for another time.

For its part, Host, in a statement from its general counsel, said it was completely unaware of the wage violations and took corrective action as soon as the issues – which ranged well beyond the Philadelphia crew – were brought to its attention Jan. 20.

Nevertheless, the hotel took the low cost labor route in its sweeping renovation of the showcase Copley Place hotel without looking at the potential political consequences.
That Host Hotels would opt to hire a nonunion contractor for its work is not that surprising – after all, workers at the hotel aren’t unionized either. But by doing so, the hotel also set itself up for scrutiny by labor activists eager to pounce on any evidence of corner-cutting, from employing illegals to the practice of misclassifying full-time employees as independent contractors.

Anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of the local construction industry knows this, with the region’s powerful carpenters’ union keeping a close eye on the issue.

Playing Dumb

Frankly, anyone who has worked in downtown Boston and has seen pickets in front of various renovation and construction projects protesting the use of a non-union contractor could figure out this is a touchy area. It happens all the time.

But if that wasn’t enough for the Marriott, Baystate Services – the contractor on the renovation job – put in a bid for $4 million, or less than half some of its union competitors, according to the Globe.
Why so low? Now that definitely should have raised some red flags.

Nothing wrong with cutting costs, but you would have thought someone in the hotel’s chain of command would have wanted to know how Baystate came up with those numbers – and, as importantly, that there was no funny business going on.
But a spokesman has said hotel management wasn’t aware anything was amiss until State Police detectives showed up at the Boston hotel in January.

In fact, hotel managers were not alone in their cluelessness – the head of Baystate has reportedly said he was also unaware of any labor law violations.

It’s enough to make Sergeant Schultz look like a standup guy.

It takes savvy to survive and thrive in Boston’s highly competitive, cut-throat hotel market.

I can’t for the world imagine Robin Brown, the legendary Four Seasons manager who went on to build the Mandarin Oriental, firing all his housekeepers. It’s also hard to imagine him not knowing who was doing the renovation work on his hotel.

The same can be said, for that matter, of Tim Kirwan, the also very savvy general manager of the InterContinental Hotel, who can tick off in an instant which minor celebrities are staying at which hotels in Boston on any particular night.
It’s no sin to operate a non-union hotel in Boston, or, for that matter, any other business, whatever the activists say.

But if you are clueless about it, you won’t last long.