SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Danny Glover helped launch a campaign to rally Puerto Rico's hotel workers to join the local branch of a large U.S. labor union in a bid to gain better pay and benefits.
Glover, whose movie credits include "The Royal Tenenbaums" and the "Lethal Weapon" series, joined leaders of the Gastronomical Union, which represents about 2,100 employees at nine hotels in the U.S. territory, to call for the island's hospitality workers to unite under a single banner.
"The union's fight is to construct a world in which we want to live," Glover said at a news conference Sunday at the Condado Plaza Hotel & Casino in the capital of San Juan.
Glover, 59, has long been involved in political activism. He has traveled to San Francisco, Boston and Toronto with labor leaders of UNITE HERE _ of which the Gastronomical Union is a member.
In Puerto Rico, about 8,000 hospitality workers do not belong to any organized union, said representatives of UNITE HERE, which represents about 450,000 workers.
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