Non-unionized workers wanting wage increases and improved conditions at hotels in the Century Boulevard area near LAX have taken their plight to the community, and a big gang of them showed up at city council chambers on Friday to present a vision of a revitalized Century Corridor. Members of the Coalition for a New Century presented thousands of petitions, most of them from residents of LAX-adjacent neighborhoods and hotel workers, asking council to back their campaign by bringing in redevelopment money and banishing the area’s infamous strip clubs.

The petitions come a week after Councilman Bill Rosendahl, whose district includes parts of LAX, filed a similar motion for changes to Century Boulevard. Danny Feingold, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, or LAANE, which has helped organize the campaign, says that both proposals were well met. “We got a great response,” Feingold says.

The coalition kicked off its campaign last month with a march and rally on the boulevard, in which hotel workers were joined by Teamsters, councilmembers, and religious and community leaders, as they walked from the Hilton to the Westin hotels at the Los Angeles Airport. Using an approach spearheaded by LAANE, workers seeking increased pay and benefits have tied their well-being to the area as a whole, looking to turn the campaign into a push for community renewal. Though unions like UNITE HERE do represent hotel workers nationwide, and the new 6-million-member Change to Win coalition is trying to organize even more, many workers at the LAX Hilton and other well-known airport-area hotels are not unionized.

“You are the first impression for Los Angeles,” said L.A. City Councilmember Janice Hahn, as she addressed the February rally. To a crowd of a few hundred people, she called LAX the “hub of tourism” in the area, and related how important it was that airport visitors see the best of the city. Hahn told the story how she recently visited the LAX Four Points Sheraton in an effort to get an explanation for the low wages and poor treatment of their workers – and was then forced to leave the premises by hotel security. “If they did that to me, the City Councilwoman, I can only imagine how they harass you, the workers,” her voice rising for emphasis as the crowd cheered.

“I’m here because of the abuse,” said Darian Judeh. “They’re separating workers by who yells out and who doesn’t.” Judeh, a young front desk agent at the LAX Hilton, said that he is looking for a second job. Already one of the higher-paid workers, making $10.90 an hour after two years at the Hilton, he says that room service staff make $8.75 an hour and housekeepers under $8. “That is not a livable wage,” he said, including that “a couple of dollars would help.”

The rally buzzed with allegations of hotel injustices as related by the people that work there, many citing management intimidation and the uniformly low wages. Ana Mendez, a coworker of Judeh’s at the LAX Hilton, said that the hotel was holding anti-union meetings. She said that Hilton human resources people came into the cafeteria as employees ate and said that they were “gonna get their heads cut-off” – meaning that any workers who tried to unionize were going to be fired. The Campaign for a New Century is trying to target non-union hotels in particular.

Mendez made the connection between low wages and area blight, noting that, on top of low wages, LAX Hilton workers must pay $300 per month for health insurance. She says these conditions “reflect in nearby communities,” as many of the employees live in the surrounding neighborhoods, where they spend their money and rely on local services.

Part of the Coalition’s purpose is not only to raise wages for workers but also revamp the Century Corridor area, which they say will positively impact the communities surrounding the area, including Hawthorne, Inglewood, and Lennox, which are among L.A. County’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

Mendez, a resident of Lennox, mentions in which ways the Century Corridor and the conditions for employees of LAX hotels, who employ many workers from nearby areas, affect the community.

“There is a lot of poverty,” says Mendez, a resident of Lennox, a small community that is probably not familiar to many Angelenos. According to a 2004 study conducted by the Center for Regional Employment Strategies, Lennox has a significantly higher per capita murder rate than the whole of L.A. County.

The coalition claims this crime and poverty could be eased by a living wage for hotel workers. “The ones who work and live here, we are the ones who know how best to improve the community,” said coalition member Reverend Altegracia Perez of the Holy Faith Episcopal Church in Inglewood in a press conference on Friday, February 10. Perez expressed her hopes of creating a Century Boulevard that is lined with cafés and boutiques and trendy chain stores, rather than “smut shops and strip clubs.”

At the rally, the desire for a sleaze-free Century Corridor was clear, with several speakers, like Danny Tabor, a former Inglewood City Councilman and Senior Community Organizer of LAANE, pointing to an abundance of porno palaces when describing the unwanted sleaze factor of the area. When leaving LAX, “the first thing we see are sex shops and some sort of nudie shops,” said Perez.

Directly across the street from the rally was Carolina Century West strip club, which recently took some heat for their sign blasting across West Century Boulevard. reading: “Vaginas R Us.” The Coalition for a New Century’s plans to revamp the Century Corridor are still not finalized, but residents are pushing to banish or move these clubs, as well as adult book and video stores.

Some residents, however, are wary that pushing smut out of an area apparently so neglected by L.A. at large, and surrounded by some of the city’s most high-crime and poverty-plagued streets, might be the first push for a gentrification wave that has taken over the rest of the Westside. Aircraft noise might seem to be a natural limiting factor for major development or home sales, but if Century Blvd cleans up to the point where it resembles, say, that of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, property values might rise in Lennox, Hawthorne, and Inglewood and drive out not only the smut shops but locals as well.

“Not only property value would rise but crime would go down,” says Rabbi Jason van Leeuwen of Westchester, a speaker at the rally, not seeing the price hikes as a community threat.

“I think that there’s going to have to be concessions made to keep small business [in the corridor area],” says Tabor.

It is still too early in the campaign to say what those concessions might be. Feingold explains that the campaign is in its initial stages. He notes that the purpose of the rally and the petitions was, in part, “to show that there is a groundswell.”

At last month’s rally, as Councilmember Hahn exhorted the crowd to sign those petitions, Tabor told everyone they had a long road ahead. “This is just the beginning, so let’s dig in deep,” Tabor said. As the crowd faded into the backdrop of billboards, fast-food signs, and strip-club marquees, Westin employees set up the hotel’s evening seafood buffet behind a tinted glass window facing the parking lot, and Hilton workers Mendez and Judeh went back to work.