hotel workers' contract talks resumed yesterday after a two-and-a-half-month adjournment.

BIU vice president Mr. Derrick Burgess charged that hoteliers were committing "fraud'' by increasing the automatic daily gratuity for guests and pocketing the change to fund wage hikes.

Hotel owners were misleading guests by not telling them management was keeping a percentage of the gratuity tagged onto their bills, he said.

The Hamilton Princess bartender also ticked off hoteliers for not making enough effort to get along with the union.

He said a bad working relationship reflected on the service hotel guests received.

Mr. Burgess said the HEB (Hotel Employers of Bermuda) must have known the BIU would not accept a contract proposal containing a wage freeze and the elimination of such clauses as the one providing for severance pay.

Putting it forward, saying the collective bargaining agreement would be thrown out altogether if workers did not accept it by February 24, 1991, did nothing to better worker-management relations, he said.

"You can't start negotiations with a threat,'' he said. "In other words they're saying if an agreement is not reached by then we'll shoot you.'' He added that when the BIU issued strike threats, they were made as a last resort. But the HEB issued its "threat'' when negotiations had not even started.

While cross examining Mr. Burgess, HEB lawyer Mr. Stephen Shawe submitted the arbitrated Hobgood award had allowed for increasing the gratuity and keeping the difference to fund wage hikes as an accommodation to hoteliers' wage-freeze call.

He will continue cross examining Mr. Burgess today.

The adjournment was the second since the talks started in May before the Essential Industries Disputes Settlement Board, chaired by Professor Ronald Haughton.

But it was anticipated the hearing would be over by the end of the month and workers would have a new contract and possibly a wage hike by the end of January.

Hoteliers have said they cannot afford to give workers any pay raise at all for the first year of their 1991-1993 contract. They have put a three percent pay raise on the table for the second two years.

The BIU, however, is asking for double that: seven, six and seven percent.

Much of yesterday was spent going over the union-rejected Hobgood award. Mr.

Burgess testified workers refused to accept it because Prof. Bill Hobgood was unfair in reaching it.

He said Prof. Hobgood had gone back on his word not to deviate from the 1988-1991 collective bargaining agreement.

And he said Prof. Hobgood met with the HEB for a full day behind closed doors, but met with the BIU for only an hour.

Mr. Burgess was the BIU's second witness as Mr. Shawe could not continue his cross examination of the first witness, hotels division president Mr. Herbert Bascome.

BIU president Mr. Ottiwell Simmons explained Mr. Bascome had not returned from Jamaica after watching his son play in Sunday's World Cup soccer qualifying game.