Coalition submits petition signatures to get hotel-worker panic buttons on ballot

On Tuesday morning, hours before 2nd District Long Beach Councilmember Jeannine Pearce was censured by her colleagues for her alleged misconduct and inappropriate sexual relationship with her former chief-of-staff, advocates for local hotel workers submitted to the city clerk’s office petitions with what they claim are enough signatures to allow voters in November to decide whether or not hotels should provide their workers with panic buttons– a primary issue that Pearce has championed in her first term.
Unite Here Local 11 and the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community delivered a dozen boxes of petitions with over 46,000 signatures Tuesday to Long Beach City Clerk Monique De La Garza for verification so that this November’s ballot will include an initiative to require hotels with 50 rooms or more to provide room cleaners with panic buttons and give workers other tools to prevent and report sexual assault and other threatening behavior in the workplace. A total of 27,000 verified signatures will be required to include the initiative on the ballot.
Representatives for the organizations say the initiative comes in response to the widespread problem of sexual harassment and assault in Long Beach’s hospitality industry.
In September of 2017, in a 5-4 vote, the Long Beach City Council rejected a similar measure– the Hospitality and Workload Safety Ordinance– designed to provide hotel workers with protections. Not long after that vote, Time Magazine featured Juana Melara, a Long Beach hotel cleaner, as one of the “Silence Breakers” whom it honored as Person of the Year.
In a press release from the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) that publicized the coalition’s success in attaining enough signatures for a ballot measure, Melara explained how, if approved, the new ordinance would work.
“The initiative would mandate that hotel employers provide panic buttons at no cost to the employee, ensure that workers reporting threatening guest conduct will not face retaliation, and require signage about the law in guest rooms,” Melara stated. “The ordinance would also include provisions restricting mandatory overtime and establishing fair compensation for arduous workloads.”
At City Hall Tuesday morning, as the boxes of petitions were being rolled on a cart into the city clerk’s office, Marlene Montañez, community organizer for LAANE, explained that the initiative is intended for hotels with 50-plus rooms because the coalition wants to impact the greatest number of workers possible and hold the larger hotel chains accountable for protecting their employees.
“We want to make sure that we’re impacting the bigger hotels that we can keep accountable versus the smaller ones that can probably not afford to front the cost [of the panic buttons],” Montañez said, adding that the cost of each device, which a worker would wear, is about $10.
Ashley Pagan, communications specialist for LAANE, who was standing nearby, added that the cost is a “small price to pay for the safety and well-being of workers.”
Montañez said her group hopes that all hotel workers will be equipped with the button.
“We want it to apply to everyone,” she said. “We know that most of these roles are not very isolated, so we’ll have sometimes restaurant workers having to deliver food to some of the rooms, depending on how many workers are on the floor. So, we want everyone to be protected. We’re using housekeepers as the main example, just because they’re the most isolated when it comes to their work, but everyone should be protected. We’re seeing registrars being harassed as well.”
The same day the coalition submitted those signatures, however, the Long Beach Hospitality Alliance called for them to be invalidated. The Alliance is alleging that signature-gatherers had been “caught this weekend using false and misleading statements.”

“The blatant falsehoods that Unite Here’s signature collectors are peddling demonstrate they know that voters would not support their initiative if they used the facts,” said Jeremy Harris, senior vice president of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and staff liaison to the Alliance. “We call on the city clerk and city prosecutor to fully investigate this violation of state law and invalidate the signatures collected using false and misleading information.”
Representatives of the Alliance claim the proposed initiative has little to do with safety but is instead an attempted power play by Unite Here.
“In fact, that is why the Long Beach City Council rejected their proposal last fall,” states a press release from the Alliance. “Now, union bosses are caught in a photo with wildly false information while attempting to convince voters to sign their petition.”
The photo in question, which the Alliance provided to the Signal Tribune Wednesday, shows a man standing behind a table outside a business. He is speaking to two women. On the table are stacks of clipboards and a sign that reads, “80% of hotel maids in Long Beach have been assaulted. Sign today 4 panic buttons.”
The statement from the Alliance claims that its hotels have a long record of advocating for safety measures on behalf of their employees and guests.
“All the hotels have panic buttons for their employees, including housekeepers,” according to the statement, “and have extensive safety protocols in place.”
Representatives from the Alliance say that only two incidents of assault against hotel workers were reported between Sept. 1, 2016 and Aug. 31, 2017, citing a Sept. 19, 2017 memorandum from Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna to City Manager Patrick West that states one assault was of a sexual nature against a female worker and the other was an assault on a male security guard.
When asked in a phone interview Wednesday to respond to the Alliance’s allegations regarding the misinformation from a signature collector and the hotels’ request for the signatures to be invalidated, Lorena Lopez, organizing director with Unite Here 11, said the signatures speak for themselves.
“We are very confident that about 46,000 residents want protections for women working in the hotel industry,” she said. “The industry’s response to the community effort to protect women in Long Beach is just pathetic.”
Lopez said that, although the Alliance claims to have panic buttons for hotel workers, her coalition wants there to be more precision as to exactly where an assault is taking place so that security can immediately address the situation.
As for any misinformation signature gatherers may have presented, Lopez said that those who did sign the petition were able to read the correct information on the form itself to make an informed decision before signing.
“Those residents have a petition in front of them,” she said. “They read what they sign.”