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Kevin Cullen

Hyatt should take page from Derek Jeter’s playbook

Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees captain, will suit up today at Fenway Park for his last game as a professional baseball player.

It was a hell of a run, and he is a hell of a ballplayer, a first ballot, maybe unanimous, Hall-of-Famer.

He had a sweet inside out swing and put more balls over Red Sox second basemen’s heads than I care to remember. The funny thing is he only hit .265 in Fenway, way below his average, and yet he beat the Sox more times and more ways than anybody I can remember.

That night, 10 years ago, when he dove into the stands in Yankee Stadium to snare a foul ball and came out bloody and smiling, leading the Bronx Bombers to victory over the Sox in 13 innings, is something I’ll never forget. That was Derek Jeter.

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But what I’ll remember most is what I saw from the Box 51 seats behind home plate that I shared with a bunch of other guys, and especially my brother’s company seats right next to the visitor’s on-deck circle.

Most ballplayers are in a zone when on-deck, about to bat. They tune out everything. They have their routine. Jeter would turn and banter with the crowd. He was always smiling. He joked with the kids who ran down the aisle to get near him. He always seemed to appreciate how lucky he was to get paid millions of dollars to play a kid’s game.

Here’s the other thing I’ll remember about Jeter: When he came to Boston for a series, he would walk around the visitor’s clubhouse at Fenway and hand out $100 bills to the workers. To everybody. Including the kids who worked the clubhouse. That’s just how he rolled.

Jeter gave millionaires a good name.

And then there are the people who run Hyatt hotels.

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They would have you believe they just did an incredibly generous and noble thing in agreeing to sprinkle $1 million on the nearly 100 housekeepers whose lives they upended four years ago.

Please don’t believe them.

Here’s what Hyatt did. They brought in desperate women who were willing to work for half the money and none of the benefits that their barely-living-wage housekeepers were making. Not only that, but they made the women they were pushing out train the women who would work for the lesser wage.

Cynical? Despicable? You pick the word.

But now everything’s fine. Hyatt has seen the light, they say, and they will reimburse those 98 housekeepers they threw out like torn sheets, to the tune of $1 million, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize that it has to be spread around almost 100 families.

Hyatt trotted out some bigshot executive named Marc Ellin to shamelessly claim that Hyatt cared deeply about the women they kicked to the curb four years ago.

“Through this agreement, we are able to demonstrate care for our former colleagues,” Ellin said. “Each of these former associates made a difference in the lives of guests who stayed in our hotels.”

Associates? Really?

I know one of those associates, Wanda Rosario, and Hyatt made a huge difference in her life when they made her train her replacement and then tossed her aside, after she gave 24 years to the company.

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She had to give up her cellphone, which forced her to sit by the house phone in her East Boston apartment, waiting for part-time work at the Park Plaza. Her family suffered so a corporation could save what a handful of Hyatt executives spend on their annual junkets.

It would be lovely to think that Hyatt had some Road to Damascus conversion, that they put their executives in a room with Artie T. Demoulas and they all came out looking like the wide-eyed, smiling Grinch after his heart grew three times that day up on Mount Crumpit.

Alas, this is all about money, as it always was. Hyatt gave their fired housekeepers some chump change and some nice words because they want to open a 1,000-room hotel at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in Southie. That’s all this is about. Nothing more, nothing less.

Oh, and Hyatt will give the fired housekeepers first dibs on jobs if they are lucky enough to be selected as the hotel vendor.

Well, that’s just swell.

At a minimum, if Hyatt is selected, their workers at the new hotel should be allowed to form a union.

It was to Unite Here Local 26 that the nonunionized housekeepers of the Hyatt hotels in and around Boston turned for help after they were fired. And it was Local 26 that got the deal with Hyatt done.

“If Hyatt gets selected, it should be a union hotel,” Mayor Marty Walsh told me in Dublin on Saturday. “Then what was done to those women four years ago couldn’t be done. What was done to them shouldn’t have been done to anyone.”

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Walsh also said he thought Hyatt could have been a little more generous in compensating women like Wanda Rosario. I’m with Marty.

Some advice to the suits at Hyatt: Be a little more like Derek Jeter, spread it around, and appreciate how lucky you are to make big money in this short life. Like Jeter, you’ll smile a lot more.


Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.