Legislators Lend Support to Improving Working Conditions

Worker Profiles

For over 20 years, Isabel “Segunda” Brentner has worked at the LAX Hilton, keeping her focus on her family and her job. “My priorities [were] to help my family,” says Brentner, who, along with raising her own children, cared for both her father and grandmother when they were ill. More

Enedina Alvarez, a 54-year-old single parent, says she must be both mother and father to her teenage children. Yet, with two jobs, she has barely enough money to house, feed and clothe them—and precious little time to spend with them. Although she receives health insurance through her job, she cannot afford to insure her children. Alvarez says, “I pray to God that my kids do not get sick because I cannot pay the medical bills.” More

Who Are Hotel Housekeepers?*

Nearly all hotel housekeepers are women. The majority are women of color and immigrants.

There are 1.3 million hotel workers in the U.S. and 280,000 in Canada, of whom approximately one quarter are housekeepers.

Hotel Housekeeper Work Is Dangerous Work

Hotel workers have a 40% higher injury rate (5.9%) than workers in the service sector (4.2%).

According to a recent study of company records covering thousands of employee injuries, hotel housekeepers face an injury rate of 10.4%, almost double the injury rate for non-housekeepers (5.6%).

Hotel housekeeper injuries are debilitating. Back injuries, housemaids' knee (bursitis), and shoulder pain can lead to permanent disability.

*UNITE HERE

Why We Need A

"PLAN FOR A
NEW CENTURY"

A new white paper calls on the city of Los Angeles and industry leaders to invest in the Century Corridor and its workforce. A Plan for a New Century will benefit workers, communities, hotels and the entire city. More

Legislators Lend Support to Improving Working Conditions
Near LAX
Copley News Service - November 3, 2006
By Dan Laidman

More than a dozen state legislators lent their support Friday to a package of laws aimed at improving working conditions at hotels near Los Angeles International Airport, as local labor and business interests geared up for a City Council showdown. The proposed ordinances would extend the city's "living wage" requirement beyond municipal contractors for the first time, make it tougher to fire workers immediately after an ownership change, and require hotels to pass along "service charges" that customers consider to be tips directly to workers.

The regulations, which would apply to the hotels along Century Boulevard between LAX and the San Diego (405) Freeway, will come before the City Council for a decision on Wednesday. Officials had planned to take up the package in late October, but delayed consideration amid a blitz of lobbying from the business community, as well as concerns about Tuesday's election providing a distraction.

With the council leadership indicating that it is likely the laws will pass, some in the business community began floating the idea of a voter referendum to try to overturn the ordinances. "This new proposal would imply that if your business is located in proximity to a city-owned facility, then the City Council has the right to become involved in the management of your business," said Gary Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. "If you're a business, any business in this city, you have to ask the question, where does this end? The answer is at the city limits." The chamber sent a letter to council members and an "action alert" to business entities warning that the ordinances could spark similar laws across the city and drive companies to other jurisdictions.

State legislators, labor leaders and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, the nonprofit pushing the ordinances, dismissed that notion at a City Hall press conference. "The hospitality industry is not going to pick up and go to Mexico because there's a living wage at the hotels by LAX," said Maria Elena Durazo, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, who pushed the city's living wage ordinance for contractors as a council member in the 1990s, said the hotels in question are fair game because they benefit from their proximity to city-owned LAX. "The hotels win (if the ordinances pass), even though they'll fight it to the death, because they'll have a stable employment base," Goldberg said.

The Century Corridor - with 13 hotels and about 3,500 workers, many of whom live in Hawthorne, Lennox and Inglewood - is a non-union exception in a hotel industry where labor has made deep inroads, and local unions have been trying to organize the hotels there for the past year. Backers of the ordinances include South Bay state Assembly members Jerome Horton, Ted Lieu and Jenny Oropeza, as well as state Senator Alan Lowenthal, according to a list released Friday by the Alliance for a New Economy.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been publicly quiet on the matter since endorsing a report that advocated all three new laws in April. An aide to the mayor said Friday that Villaraigosa still supports an extended living wage, worker retention and service charge regulation in concept, but he has not taken a position on the specific ordinances pending a review by his staff.