Samaranch hotel to use strike-busters

The luxury hotel where IOC chief Juan Antonio Samaranch will stay during next month's Olympics in Sydney has upset its workers with a plan to bring in room cleaners from Indonesia for the Games.

The Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union said that as many as 30 Indonesian cleaners and housekeepers would join the hotel, which is under a strike threat in a dispute over payment of an "Olympic bonus" to employees.

A spokesman for the Regent Hotel denied union charges that the workers would not be paid full Australian wages and would be forced to stay five to 10 a room.

"We've got four or five colleagues coming from our sister property in Jakarta coming in for the period, but they will be paid the equivalent of what people working here will be paid," hotel spokesman Peter Tudehope told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Tudehope also denied union charges the workers would not have proper working visas, adding the the move was part of an exchange offered to employees in the hotel chain on a regular basis.

The union, which staged a protest outside the hotel on Monday to back a call for an Olympics bonus of $A550 ($315) per worker during the Sept 15 to Oct 1 Games, said it would ask the government "to investigate the way the hotel is using imported foreign labour".

"We're told they are to be put up in the hotel five or 10 to a room and told not to talk to Australian colleagues," hotel union spokesman Mark Boyd said.

A union statement said Samaranch would be staying in the hotel's Presidential Suite, which has two bedrooms, a dining room, marble bathrooms and costs A$4,350 ($2,500) a night.

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