Above photo: Hotel workers walk a picket line in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday after thousands of workers at hotels in Southern California walked off the job demanding higher pay and better benefits. Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times.
Thousands of workers at hotels across Southern California walked off the job early Sunday demanding higher pay and better benefits, beginning what could be the largest U.S. hotel workers’ strike in recent memory.
The strike will affect roughly 15,000 cooks, room attendants, dishwashers, servers, bellmen and front desk agents at hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties, including the JW Marriott in the L.A. Live entertainment district and luxury destinations like the Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica.
More than 500 workers at the InterContinental and Indigo hotels in downtown Los Angeles were the first to join the strike on Sunday, taking to the streets with picket signs at 6 a.m. Workers at the DoubleTree by Hilton and the Biltmore Los Angeles downtown soon joined the walkout along with those from the Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa in Dana Point, workers said.
The workers at LA’s 2nd BIGGEST hotel are ON STRIKE at the InterContinental DTLA. #SoCalHotelStrike (What about the 1st BIGGEST hotel in LA? They did the right thing and settled a fair contract with their workers! *hint hint*)
Bonus reply: Yes, it seems bigger IS better 🙃 pic.twitter.com/nyuEvJNP1m
— UNITE HERE Local 11 (@UNITEHERE11) July 2, 2023
“Our members were devastated first by the pandemic, and now by the greed of their bosses,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, in a statement Sunday morning. “The industry got bailouts while we got cuts. Now, the hotel negotiators decided to take a four-day holiday instead of negotiating. Shameful.”
The union is seeking a $5 immediate hourly wage increase for members and a $3 boost annually for the entirety of their 3-year contract. The union has also made proposals related to healthcare, pensions, workload and a policy against hotels using E-Verify, a federal system used to check work eligibility, to protect immigrant workers.
Early Sunday in downtown, Metro bus drivers and cars passing by honked their horns in support of the workers who had gathered outside the InterContinental hotel. Music in Spanish blasted next to a tent with doughnuts and coffee as strikers in Unite Here Local 11 red shirts checked in for their shifts.
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” said Diana Rios Sanchez, a supervisor and former room attendant at the InterContinental.
Attendees of Anime Expo — the largest anime convention in North America that kicked off Saturday — passed by the workers as they walked to the Los Angeles Convention Center. Some waved in support, but most seemed focused on getting to the convention.
“Únete, únete — a la lucha únete!” (Join, join, join the fight, join!) workers chanted as they marched on the sidewalk near the hotel entrances.
At the InterContinental, staff cuts during the pandemic have resulted in fewer workers doing more, Sanchez said.
“Before, we had 800 [people]. Now we have 500,” Sanchez said. “Now we’re basically doing the job of two or three…”
She said she has to support her three kids and that healthcare costs have gone up since the pandemic.
“They prefer giving the money to agencies than giving us the rest that we deserve,” Sanchez said, noting that the InterContinental brought in temp agency workers two days ago.
Contracts expired midnight on Friday at 62 Southern California hotels where workers are represented by Unite Here Local 11. At least 17 of those hotels are experiencing work stoppages today, including Hotel Figueroa and the Proper Hotel in downtown L.A. as well as the W Hotel in Westwood. Santa Monica hotels on strike include the Le Meridien Delfina, Hampton Inn & Suites and the Viceroy, a luxury resort. Workers at Courtyard by Marriott locations in downtown and Santa Monica are also striking.
More strikes will occur throughout Los Angeles throughout the day, said Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson Maria Hernandez.
L.A. Councilman Kevin de Leon said he is solidly on the side of the workers. The son of a single mother, an immigrant and hotel worker, he knows how hard the work is for this group that lives in the “lowest economic strata.”
“I believe that our city’s economy is built on the hotel workers… they are the backbone, the drivers of our economy,” he said. “To many people, hotel workers are viewed as expendable in a job that nobody wants. And I believe that cannot be further from the truth.”
He said he’s hopeful negotiations will prove fruitful and speedy. The industry is important to the city and its coffers. But he said now is the time for the City Council to not just show solidarity – “shaking their fist in the picket line” – but to get onto the business of ensuring there is affordable housing for workers in the city.
“Many workers – in most cases women – are just a step away from homelessness,” he said, underscoring the essential and hard work they perform. “This isn’t a lack of work effort.”
The union on Wednesday evening landed a deal with its biggest employer, the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in downtown L.A., with more than 600 workers. Union officials described the tentative agreement as a major win for workers. Bonaventure employees will receive higher wages, affordable health insurance and increases in pension contributions. The agreement also guarantees a restoration of cleaning staff to pre-pandemic levels.
However, talks with other hotels remain heated. A coalition of more than 40 hotels involved in negotiations blasted the union in an emailed statement Friday, accusing its leaders of canceling a scheduled bargaining session and refusing to come to the table.
Unite Here Local 11 “has not budged from its opening demand two months ago of up to a 40% wage increase and an over 28% increase in benefit costs,” the hotel group said. “From the outset, the Union has shown no desire to engage in productive, good faith negotiations with this group.”
Keith Grossman, an attorney with Hirschfeld Kraemer, one of two legal firms representing the hotel coalition, took issue with the union’s support for certain policy proposals, including a measure set for the 2024 ballot that would require hotels in Los Angeles to rent vacant rooms to homeless people.
Grossman said the coalition has offered meaningful wage increases, proposing raises of $2.50 an hour in the first 12 months and $6.25 over four years. Under its proposal, housekeepers at unionized hotels in Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles, currently earning $25 per hour, would receive 10% wage increases in 2024 and make more than $31 in hourly wages by January 2027.
“We are aware that some of the employees at a number of downtown and Westside hotels are engaging in a work stoppage,” Grossman said in an emailed statement Sunday. “This activity was expected. We are fully prepared to continue to operate these hotels and to take care of our guests as long as this disruption lasts. We also remain available to meet with the union whenever its leaders decide to make themselves available to resume negotiations.”
Hernandez denied the union had canceled any scheduled negotiations and said it is pushing hotel companies to accept the higher wage proposal it made at the outset of negotiations.
“Workers won’t take anything less than that,” Hernandez said. The union expects the strike to last multiple days.
The union represents more than 32,000 hospitality workers across Southern California and Arizona. Its members are nonmanagement hotel employees, including people who staff front desks, clean rooms and work in hotel restaurants.
The primary sticking point for workers is the demand for higher pay, needed, they say, to cover rising housing costs in the region. Expensive housing is causing many workers to live far from their jobs, saddling them with hours-long commutes.
Brenda Mendoza drives more than two hours from her home in Apple Valley to get to the JW Marriott, where she has worked as a uniform attendant for 13 years. When she first started working downtown, she lived in Koreatown and her commute was 10 minutes, but significant rent increases forced her and her two sons to move further away.
“A lot of the workers I train have moved away because they’re not able to live where we are right now. The gas has gone up and everything’s expensive,” Mendoza said as she put on her red union shirt to start her shift on the picket line.
Bellen Valle, a single mother who works as a housekeeper at JW Marriott, danced along the picket line holding a clapper.
“We are faithful to the hotel. They’re gonna bring people from the agencies but they don’t have the experience we have,” Valle said of temporary workers hired to staff the hotel.
Amy Campbell, a spokesperson for JW Marriott, said the hotel has “well-established protocols in place to operate… and take care of guests.” She added they are “committed to working towards a fair labor agreement.”
Tensions flared Thursday at the Viceroy Santa Monica, a luxury resort, where union organizers accused management of bringing in temporary workers in case of a strike.
Rocelia Morales, a housekeeper of 40 years at the hotel, said a group of about 10 workers who said they were recent immigrants from Ecuador arrived in the lobby Thursday, suitcases in tow. “The contract is still in force, so we told the company that we felt betrayed. We felt that they played with people’s feelings,” Morales said.
Housekeeping staff were tasked with setting up cots in some rooms, according to Unite Here Local 11 organizer Hannah Petersen. But when staff asked management about the new arrivals, she said, the hotel denied plans to bring in temporary workers.
The Viceroy Santa Monica did not respond to a request for comment.
Peter Hillan, a spokesperson for the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles, an industry group, said that it is “standard practice” for hotels to hire temporary workers to ensure guests are served and that workers shouldn’t be surprised they’d be replaced if they threaten to walk off the job. Hillan said his group had expected the strike to begin Saturday.
“I’m puzzled and confused about what Unite Here’s plans are,” Hillan said.
The hotel worker strike threat is among a burst of job actions in what California labor leaders have dubbed “hot labor summer.” Unions across multiple industries are pushing for pay hikes.
Hollywood writers have been on strike since May 2, and actors are in tense negotiations with studios. SAG-AFTRA members had voted to authorize a strike if their leaders couldn’t secure a new film and TV contract to replace one that expired at midnight Friday. But the union agreed Friday to allow more time to negotiate, averting a strike for now.
Hotel workers in California last staged a major strike in 2018, when nearly 8,000 housekeepers, bartenders and other workers walked off the job at 23 Marriott hotels in eight U.S. cities, including San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. That strike lasted more than two months before contract agreements were reached.
Hospitality experts have said this weekend’s strike has the potential to cause temporary disruptions and pain points for hotel operators and guests, but probably would have little significant long-term effect. However, prolonged and concurrent strikes of hotel workers, screenwriters and actors could have ripple effects on other businesses that rely on L.A.’s tourism and Hollywood industries, as film and television are an important economic engine. The California economy lost an estimated $2.1 billion during the 2007 writers strike.
The strike also comes amid what is typically a busy time for the hospitality industry as tourists flock to destinations across Southern California for the Fourth of July weekend. It coincided with the Anime Expo, where thousands of fans of Japanese pop culture gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center and nearby hotels over four days to celebrate manga art, cosplay and video games.
Inside the JW Marriott, hundreds of Anime Expo attendees waited in line Sunday morning for a question and answer session with popular VTubers, online entertainers that use virtual avatars generated by computer graphics.
Justin Zellerer, who traveled to the event from Ottawa, Canada, said it was his first time seeing workers strike.
“I hope they get what they’re asking for,” Zellerer said. “I assume if they’re striking, then it’s pretty bad.”
Kson, an American-Japanese streamer and YouTube star, commented from the stage on the activity happening outside the event.
“America is so intense, having car chases, carjacks everywhere,” Kson said as the audience chuckled. “Every hotel is having a strike.”
Some convention attendees had heard about the potential for a walkout over the weekend and planned ahead. Alma Bermudes packed amenities so she wouldn’t have to rely on hotel services in the event of a walkout.
Yohannes Laksana and his friend Trisha Pei flew in from Austin, Texas, for the Anime Expo, and on Saturday waited in the “weapons check” line outside the Convention Center’s North Hall entrance. Laksana sported a red wig, cosplaying as Diluc, a character from the action role-playing game Genshin Impact.
The pair are staying at a Hilton hotel in Pasadena, and said when they woke up that morning they found a notice slipped under their door. It was an advisory from the Hilton alerting guests to the potential for a strike and suggesting they request services ahead of time as staffing might be limited.
Laksana and Pei are considering asking for extra towels, just in case.