Sapped by prolonged contract negotiations, union workers for Hyatt Hotels last week voted to authorize a potential labor strike at the company’s four Chicago-area hotels.

The hotel workers union Unite Here Local 1 and a number of major hotel chains have been at a bargaining impasse over wage, staffing and benefits agreements since August of 2009, when the union’s last contract expired.

Representatives from the union said on Friday that Hyatt workers voted with 92 percent in favor of striking. The union represents more than 6,500 hotel workers in Chicago.

The strike vote does not mean that the workers are going on strike, but only that the union now has the ability to initiate a strike if necessary.

If called, the strike would pull workers from neighborhood hotels like the Hyatt Regency Chicago, near Michigan and Wacker, and the Park Hyatt, at Chicago and Michigan, as well as the Hyatt McCormick Place and O’Hare locations.

Union leaders are calling on Hyatt and other major union-staffed chains such as Starwood Hotels and Sheraton Hotels to maintain wages levels, set at around $15 an hour for entry level positions, and current benefits packages in the new contracts. Hyatt has countered that profit drops in the down market have forced them to include healthcare concessions as part of the negotiations.

Several labor activists and union members were arrested in a staged demonstration outside of the Hyatt Regency in protest over the negotiations in late July.

Local 1 spokesperson Annemarie Strassel said that union workers are wary of getting locked into long-term “recession-time” contracts while the hotels continue to regain profits.

The union has claimed that Hyatt can afford to continue providing no-pay healthcare, citing that the company reported over $1.3 billion in available cash assets in late March.

A spokesperson for Hyatt said that the company is committed to reaching an agreement “that provides a sustainable benefit plan to our employees, including competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits.”

“We only see a strike as hurting our own employees and we don’t want that to happen,” the hotel spokesperson wrote in an e-mail.

While the vote does not necessarily mean that a strike will be called — last year, a similar vote was approved for Starwood workers but a strike has not yet been called there — the authorization does up the ante for union leaders trying to maintain their ground and for workers trying to keep their jobs.

Bridget Stalla is a cook at the Park Hyatt. She voted in favor of the authorization, but admitted that prospect of a strike is unsettling. Her fiancée, also a cook, is currently on workers compensation from an accident on the job. Stalla said that they have spent the duration of the negotiations preparing for a possible walk-out.

“It does take some mental and financial preparation,” she said. “We’re just not going out to eat and not spending money on frivolous things, because I know this is important.”

Arnie Karr, chief operating officer of the Hotel Employers Labor Relations Association, the firm that represents all of the hotels currently in negotiations with Local 1, said that the strike votes like the one approved last week are taken seriously by hotels and unions alike.

“They do move things along; it builds a fire under both parties, so to speak,” he said.