Dozens of housekeeping employees at the Hilton DoubleTree Suites hotel in Allston held a one-day strike Thursday.
The housekeeping employees have tried for more than a year to persuade Harvard University, which owns but does not manage the hotel, to side with them in their effort to unionize. On Thursday morning, they rallied outside Harvard’s Science Center with the university’s unionized dining hall workers.
“There has never been a hotel workers’ strike in Boston that housekeepers have participated in,” said Tiffany Ten Eyck, an organizer with the Local 26 union that represents Boston hospitality workers at many other hotels. “We have a tremendously good relationship with the hotels in Boston.”
The group of housekeeping workers and their supporters are not picketing at the hotel, but Ten Eyck said many striking workers were scheduled to work today and chose to demonstrate instead.
About 700 students, religious workers, and hotel and food service workers from around the city showed up for a rally Thursday evening outside the Science Center to support the housekeepers’ unionization efforts.
A spokesman for Hilton Worldwide said 19 of the 23 housekeeping staff who were scheduled to work this morning arrived for their shifts and said the hotel was operating normally. Ten Eyck said she doubted the figure provided by the hotel operator.
Jack Newsham can be reached at jack.newsham@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter@TheNewsHam.