LB Hotel Workers Get Minium Wage Increase on the March 2024 Ballot

By Daniel Rivera, Reporter

On Sept. 19, Long Beach City Council voted unanimously to send a wage  increase for hospitality workers to next year’s ballot and let Long Beach residents decide. The ballot initiative comes off the back of an in-house  labor report on the impact of the wage increase on  Long Beach hotels and the tourism economy. Community organizers have been pushing for this initiative since May of this year. 

The ballot was initiated by the Long Beach City Council and it comes off a past ordinance called Measure N, which raised the wages of hospitality workers to $13  in November  2012. 

What makes it different from Measure N is how it empowers the city council to further raise wages after 2028.

The ballot as it stands aims to increase the wages of employees working for hotels with over 100 rooms, increasing in stages  over the next four years until it reaches $29.50 by 2028, the same year as the Olympics. 

“The Olympics will be a momentous for our entire region, the Olympics hasn’t been hosted here since 1980… it’s recognition that for a month, we are going to have the entire world descend upon our region,” Juan Munoz-Guevera, Lynwood City Councilman and Political Coordinator with UNITE HERE Local 11 told Random Lengths News. 

The ordinance will go to ballot on March 5 next year, and will increase the wages initially, see about a $6.50 increase in the first year or about 31% and $1.50 or 6.5% every year until it reaches $29.50 by 2028. 

During the meeting, the Deputy Director of Economic Development for the City of Long Beach, Johnny Vallejo, presented various statements of concern from local hotel operators, primarily focusing on competitiveness and passing on additional costs to customers in the form of raised bills and fees. 

These concerns were presented by multiple members of the Northeast Los Angeles Hotel Owners Association who made comments sharing similar concerns. Most of the hotels in Long Beach are larger than 100 rooms, making up about 73% of hotels in Long Beach. Hotels that have 100 rooms and less are exempted from the ballot initiative with the interests of small business in mind. 

“You know there is always some compression that will happen,” Ray Patel, the president of Northeast Los Angeles Owners Association, said after the vote went through. “We will just have to see how the whole tourism market evolves.” . He along with several owners of small hotels made similar comments expressing concerns about the rising costs of labor and being forced to raise booking fees to account for them.

Vallejo also presented data collected by the city which compared  the various concurrent wage initiatives made by unions in other cities, including: Anaheim at $25 per hour or Santa Monica at $30 per hour. Most cities that surround Long Beach are proposing putting on the ballot similar minimum wage increases. 

“This is a regional movement, many things are happening, many things are happening all at once,” Munoz explained the large-scale cooperative efforts that UNITE HERE Local 11 has done for various workplaces across the city when it comes to organizing ballot initiatives and campaigns. 

Long Beach has invested hundreds of millions into its various hotels, beautification projects, and other money making assets like the Queen Mary as Long Beach has a total tourism industry valued at over $1 billion. 

“I think 2013 wages aren’t going to cut it over the next few years and we need to look at raising the wage to avoid labor shortages,” and “we want to grow, we want to invest in tourism there is a lot we want to do we want more business, we want to build more hotels,” said Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson when commenting on the ballot to discuss the importance of retaining workers while also growing Long Beach as a city for tourism.

Many workers with UNITE HERE Local 11 spend a large portion of their income on rent, reported numbers range between 50% to about 70% every month with about 60% of the entire city being renters. 

Increasing wages for employees to be able to live where they work is a principal concern of the ballot, the intention in retention of employees by making possible to live where they work but that being said earlier in that same meeting, in a new project development of about 390 new apartment units only about 17 of which were for low-income. 

One of the ways Long Beach has tackled housing insecurity and low-income earners is through implementing rules that new development must include some low-income housing. 

“We echo the workers about housing,” Patel said, before answering a question about the impact on worker retention. “The solution for affordable housing lies in the government’s hands, they collect the taxes, they need to build affordable housing… it should not be the burden of a business sector, but it looks like they are shifting it to hotel owners.”   

The majority of pro-hotel comments came from mostly small, local hotels owned by families of color. Most of those hotels would not be affected by the ballot directly. But they would be impacted by  wage competition with other hotels who would be forced to raise their rates.