About 120 housekeepers, cooks and other hotel workers began a two-week strike on Thursday at the Hyatt West Hollywood, prompting six other major Los Angeles hotels to vote to lock out their unionized workers, though they set no date to start the lockout.

Labor contracts covering some 2,800 Los Angeles hotel workers expired April 2004 and the union has been seeking a new deal that would expire next year, but the Los Angeles hotels council has adamantly opposed a 2006 deal.

The Unite Here union has been seeking roughly simultaneous contracts in major cities across the country that would expire next year, increasing labor's bargaining power for the post-2006 deals.

In addition to the Hyatt, the Los Angeles Hotel Employer's Council includes independent hotels as well as properties run by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.

Hotels called the lockout a defensive move in response to the strike, while Unite Here union spokeswoman Amanda Cooper said the hotels "want to blow this into an irresponsible action that will really harm the city."

The union said it called the strike at the Hyatt to pressure the hotel council members to return health-care payments of $10 per week the union says were collected illegally.

Council spokesman Fred Muir said an exact date for when the lockout would begin has not been set, but the council did extend until midnight on Saturday its latest contract offer, which includes a 22 percent wage increase over four years and $1,000 signing bonuses.

The union filed a complaint over the issue of health-care payments with the National Labor Relations Board and the board's general counsel found in January that the hotels may have acted illegally in declaring an impasse in contract talks and imposing the co-pays.

The hotels' council, for its part, last week filed a complaint with the NLRB accusing Unite Here of unfair bargaining after the labor union reached side agreements with two individual members of the council -- the Wilshire Grand and the Millennium Biltmore.

The two properties agreed to advocate within the council for a 2006 contract in return for being taken off the union's "active" boycott list.

In addition to those two hotels and the Hyatt West Hollywood, the other Employer's Council hotels are the Westin Bonaventure, Sheraton Universal, Regent Beverly Wilshire and the Westin Century Plaza.

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