The real story behind the Brunei boycott

It seemed to begin last month, when Ellen DeGeneres sent out this tweet.

The talk show host had vowed to boycott the Beverly Hills Hotel, one of several luxury hotels owned by the sultan of Brunei, in response to the tiny but oil-rich country's implementation of a penal code that would make adultery and gay sex punishable by death.

Celebrities like Jay Leno and Sharon Osbourne, as well as dozens of organizations, followed suit, publicly casting their opposition to the elite Dorchester Collection chain that also includes London’s Dorchester, Paris’ Hotel Plaza Athénée and the Hotel Bel-Air in California.

A bevvy of organizations scheduled to hold events at the Beverly Hills Hotel, like the Feminist Majority Foundation, which publishes Ms. Magazine, switched venues.

"How could we hold a global women's rights event at a hotel whose owner was about to impose these Taliban laws in Brunei?" executive director Kathy Spillar explained about the foundation's decision.

To date, the hotel has lost $1.5 million in cancelled bookings. And last week, the Beverly Hills City Council upped the ante, condemning Brunei's government in a 5-0 vote and urging new ownership.

For activists who want to shed light on how to fight LGBT rights violations and raise awareness, this viral campaign offers an aspirational model. But what few supporters may realize is that the real story of how it began isn't about an LGBT protest at all; it's rooted in grinding labor dispute that finally found its hook this month after more than a year.

In 2009, the Sultan of Brunei and his company shut down the Hotel Bel-Air for a multimillion-dollar renovation, laying off nearly 300 union workers. When it re-opened two years later, the hotel hired mostly new workers, ones who didn't belong to a union.

The move raised the ire of an organization called Unite Here Local 11, which represents some 20,000 hospitality workers in Los Angeles and Orange County.

"These are mostly low wage workers from hotel housekeepers to cooks to bellmen," said Leigh Shelton, a labor organizer with Unite Here. "It's customary if a hotel is going to shut down for renovations that they make an agreement with the current workers to come back to work when the hotel re-opens."

Like Pablo Contreras, many workers had been at the hotel for years. An immigrant from El Salvador with two young children, he had worked full time at Hotel Bel-Air for five years bussing tables. At the same time, he held down a part-time job at another hotel.

After being laid off, Contreras lost his apartment, unable to afford it.

"I feel like very sad, like the Hotel Bel-Air [was] using me," he explained. "Like when you threw the furniture to the trash, that's the way I was feeling."

Jones is a longtime labor organizer, but he's best known as a leader in the LGBT movement and the founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

He also has 10,000 friends and followers on Facebook, so when Jones started posting there about Brunei's penal code, he quickly saw a response.

"Every morning I get up and see how this has spread," he said. "Boy, it's just amazing."

Thanks to social media, the union got its boycott, even if it had to wrap itself in a different cause to get results, and Jones is OK with that.

"If you want to reach the public you've got to find that phrase, those words that jump out and pull them into the story," he said.