The way Alfonsina Patino sees it, the owners of the Congress Plaza Hotel were using other people to get rich.

That's why she walked out five years ago when the hotel's management suggested eliminating employees' health and retirement benefits and cutting their wages by 7 percent.

At the time, Patino worked as a housekeeper. She made $8.83 an hour.

The strike at the Michigan Avenue hotel is now the longest running active strike in the United States, according to a spokeswoman for the hotel workers' union.

A rally is scheduled for 4 p.m. today to mark the five-year anniversary.

Since the strike started Patino has worked a double shift. She arrives at 6 a.m. at the picket line in front of the Michigan Avenue hotel, then leaves at 7:30 a.m. to clean rooms at The Westin. She returns at 5 p.m. to picket another three hours.

Her husband wants her to stop. Her children complain they never see her. She tells them the only way to achieve a goal worth having is to fight for it.

"People don't realize that what we're doing is big - defending the rights of people," she says.

The hotel doesn't see it that way. No business in the country has an obligation to comply with a union's demands, says Peter Andjelkovich, the hotel's attorney and chief negotiator.

The hotel is owned by investors in 520 S. Michigan Avenue Associates, a group that includes businessmen Albert Nasser, who lives in Switzerland and New York, and Ivor Braka, who owns property in six states. The hotel's mortgage is held by a company based in the British Virgin Islands and controlled by Nasser's cousin.

Andjelkovich says the hotel wants Unite Here! Local 1, which represents most of the city's unionized hotel employees, including the strikers, to accept one of their offers and resolve the face-off, but they've taken "a militant stand."

"The union walked out of here," he says. "The Congress didn't push them out. The ball's in their court. There's been many good offers made."

Andjelkovich declined to comment on what, specifically, the hotel offered, saying the hotel did not negotiate in public. The two sides last sat down for formal negotiations in August.

In the past five years, contracts negotiated by Unite Here! Local 1 have increased pay for workers at downtown, unionized hotels to $10 an hour, and then to $13.90 an hour.

"The fight at the Congress Hotel is the most visible part of a citywide struggle to take what were low-wage workers and lift them out of poverty into middle-class jobs," says Annemarie Strassel, a spokeswoman for Unite Here! Local 1.

The process has happened before, Strassel says. Manufacturing jobs, which underpinned the middle class in the middle of the 20th century, used to be "dirty, sweatshop jobs that exploited immigrants." Unions struggled to change those conditions.

"We'd like to see the same thing happen for service jobs that happened for heavy manufacturing in the first half of the 20th century," Strassel says.

The scene outside the Congress Plaza Hotel on Tuesday morning makes it obvious that achieving that goal will not be easy. Seven workers shuffle along the sidewalk. One man holds a coffee cup in one hand and an "On Strike" sign in the other. Another reads a newspaper while he walks. A few more workers sit nearby.

Most workers picket in the early morning or evenings. Although manned 15 hours a day, seven days a week, the line thins in the late morning as workers leave for second jobs.

Being on strike for five years isn't easy. That's five Chicago winters with two pairs of pants to stay warm. It's a little boring, strikers say, and sometimes a little discouraging, like when hotel customers tell workers to get a job.

Neither side can foresee a resolution from here. But Patino intends to keep picketing.

"We want to teach people we can do it," she says. "We're not just doing it for ourselves, but for the new generation to come, and people in the same situation as us."