Some 60 hotel employees Tuesday morning held a demonstration outside the entrance of the David InterContinental hotel in Tel Aviv, demanding that the hotel's management allow the hotel's 500 employees to unionize and renegotiate their terms of employment with the Histadrut.

The demonstrators were stationed at the entrance to the hotel for an hour and a half, but were turned away by security when they attempted to enter its lobby.

The Histadrut has been holding negotiations with the hotel's management over unionization of its employees.

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According to the Histadrut, the Hotel's management has been sabotaging the employees' legal right to unionize.

The hotel management denied that the employees are Histadrut members, and said that none of them reported Histadrut membership even though they had been requested to do so.

The Histadrut has announced that it will contact the hotel chain's international management and ask them to intervene.

The Histadrut is also considering calling for a boycott of the chain over the violation of its workers' rights.

According to David InterContinental Tel Aviv spokeswoman Dana Elgazy, the Histadrut had been illegally collecting membership fees from the hotel's employees for years, and the reason for the Histadrut's struggle is the fact that the hotel had the funds returned to the employees. "The hotel's management never barred the employees from unionizing," she said.

The hotel's parent company on Tuesday filed a NIS 1 million libel suit against Histadrut seniors in Tel Aviv for distributing slanderous letters to the hotel's employees.