The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to adopt an initiative that will boost wages for the city’s hotel workers, while providing increased protection against sexual assault and other threats they may face on the job.
The Hotel Worker Protection Initiative, backed by Unite Here Local 11, comes in response to the industry’s attempt to increase workloads and cut labor costs by eliminating daily room cleaning during the pandemic. It also provides protection against sexual assault for housekeepers while cleaning guest rooms.
Unite Here spokeswoman Maria Hernandez said hotel employees face increased workloads when rooms aren’t cleaned on a regular basis.
“If a hotel room hasn’t been cleaned in four or five days that’s a lot more work for someone to go in there and clean it up,” she said.
Passed on a 10-3 vote
Councilman Kevin de Leon spearheaded the motion to approve the Hotel Worker Protection Initiative, which was seconded by Councilman Curren Price and passed on a 10-3 vote.
The measure comes up for a second vote next week and is expected to be signed into law by Mayor Eric Garcetti. It would take effect about 30 days after that.
The ordinance will provide:
- Automatic daily room cleaning throughout the industry
- Panic buttons and other security measures to protect hotel housekeepers from sexual assault and threatening conduct
- Fair compensation for heavy workloads
- Expansion of minimum wage law for hotel workers
The employees – including non-union workers and others represented by Unite Here Local 11 – have worked since late January to gather the 61,000 signatures needed to qualify the Hotel Worker Protection Initiative for the November ballot.
“They actually collected about 110,000 signatures,” Hernandez said.
By adopting the measure, the City Council will make the initiative an ordinance, avoiding an expensive and divisive general election campaign in November. It also makes Los Angeles one of the nation’s first cities to require daily room cleaning.
“Our city hosts tens of millions of tourists and convention visitors annually, and hotel workers are most often the first faces tourists see,” de Leon said in a statement. “These workers deserve the basic rights to workplace safety and wage protections that this plan provides and they shouldn’t have to wait until November to get them.”
A minimum wage requirement currently exists for L.A. hotels with 150 or more rooms, but those with fewer rooms are not tied to that requirement. The ordinance expands the mandate to include facilities with 60 or more rooms, Hernandez said.
A need for panic buttons
Martha Moran worked as a housekeeper at the famed Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles for 33 years before being laid off in March 2020 when business plummeted during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panic buttons, she said, are sorely needed.
“One guest tried to grope me when I was cleaning a room and another guest offered me $100 to be with him,” the 57-year-old Glendora resident said. “I was scared.”
Last month, a representative with Chateau Marmont said all of its housekeepers are equipped with personal security devices as outlined in the initiative, adding that it supports the use of those devices at all hotels.
Moran, who earned $18 an hour before being let go, is seeking to get her job back under the city’s right-of-recall law. The ordinance, signed into effect in May 2020, requires employers to make a written offer of employment to laid off workers for any available position for which the employee qualifies after the effective date of the ordinance.
A recovery built on fairness
Kurt Petersen, Unite Here Local 11’s co-president, said the Hotel Worker Protection Initiative is a transformational ordinance that will likely spread throughout the country.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated hotel workers,” he said. “The hotels are doing fine — they’ve gotten billions of dollars in handouts from the federal government — but they’re trying to make fewer people do more work.”
Petersen said the industry has bounced back with occupancy rates that are equal to, if not higher than, pre-pandemic numbers.
“This one-of-a-kind initiative means the recovery can be built on fairness, as opposed to greed,” he said.
