By Teresa Rochester

As striking janitors and their supporters took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles and Century City Friday demanding higher wages, maids, cooks, bellhops and dishwashers in Santa Monica danced to cumbias in the sanctuary of the Church in Ocean Park in celebration of a major victory in a bitter five-year labor battle.

In a landslide decision, workers at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel voted 161 to 7 for representation by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union Local 814, ensuring the union retained its foothold at the city's only unionized hotel.

Cheers erupted in the hotel's Starlight Ballroom as Steve Alduenda of the National Labor Relations Board Region 31 announced the results of the vote.

"This is a complete victory you have won," John Wilhelm, president of the International Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, told workers. "It's a wonderful story of all of you that have been working here and working hard. You've sent a message throughout the U.S. and I will carry that message throughout the U.S."

"Today for me is a big day. A very big day, because we won the election," said Avelino Alverez, who has worked as a cook at the oceanfront luxury hotel for 24 years. "Its amazing after five years of struggling it's all worth it. For all of these years we lived a very bitter life. We never imagined this amazing victory."

Five years earlier, when the hotel was still the Miramar Sheraton and owned by Fujita Corporation, USA, management launched a bitter campaign to oust the 40-year-old union after an employee filed a petition in 1995 to decertify it.

In the months leading up to the 1997 election, Workers relayed incidents of being intimated and coerced by management. At one point management posted pictures of a union organizers as Hitler next to the hotel's time clocks. On another occasion then general manager William Worcester dressed as Darth Vadar from "Star Wars" while telling workers not to vote for the union.

The union failed by 12 votes and the NLRB threw out the results charging management with engaging in unfair labor practices and mandating that another election take place. By the time Friday's vote came to pass the hotel had been sold to Marist, Wolff &Co. - owner of the unionized Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and the Four Seasons Santa Barbara Biltmore -- which vowed to remain neutral during the current campaign.

"I feel free. I can smell the freedom," said 10-year Miramar employee and union organizing committee member, Hector Cuatepotzo, at the worker's victory party. "This is like a holiday for me. Last night I couldn't sleep."