BY ANDREW GUMBEL  
Rhina and Cesar Perez were never the favourite employees of the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Aside from their housekeeping duties, the husband and wife team were also active in a campaign to unionise low-wage service workers, something that may well have been their undoing.

Within hours of the 11 September attacks, both were told their jobs had been cancelled. "They told us all their convention business had dried up," Mr Perez said.

Across the hospitality industry, anywhere between one and three million people are estimated to have lost their jobs. Even those who are still nominally working have had their hours cut from a full 40 hours to the equivalent of just two or three days a week. Most are either immigrants with limited prospects for finding other jobs, or former welfare recipients who cannot go back to the old regime of state subsistence because it has been abolished.

These are the makings of a major social and economic crisis. What both unions and respected economic number crunchers are beginning to suspect, however, is that 11 September was not the inevitable trigger for lay-offs so much as a pretext to shed workers that employers had been itching to get rid of anyway.

The airline and the hotel industries were both hurting because of the slide in economic fortunes that began last year.  
 
 
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