The Long Beach City Council meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 7 at Long Beach City Hall featured a large number of local supporters for a proposed initiative to be placed on the November ballot that would mandate Long Beach hotels, defined as those with more than 50 rooms, to provide employees more worker protections and “panic buttons,” electronic contact devices that would alert on-site security in the event of an emergency. The council voted unanimously, after a lengthy discussion, to approve the ordinance for community vote in November. The above picture is from labor union Unite Here Local 11’s Twitter page and shows some supporters from Tuesday night.
The Long Beach City Council voted unanimously during its meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 7 to place the “Stand with Women Against Abuse” initiative, a proposed protection for hotel workers against sexual and violent assault, on the Nov. 6 ballot.
Local voters will have a choice to mandate Long Beach hotels with more than 50 rooms to provide the aforementioned protections and “panic buttons,” an electronic contact device that would alert on-site security in an emergency, to employees.
The city council weighed in on the agenda item concerning the initiative Tuesday, and the councilmembers made the decision to put the ballot proposal up for community vote– as opposed to accepting the initiative outright that evening or requesting a report on the ordinance that would delay the proposal for a period of time.
The city council also directed staff to concurrently develop a study to determine the potential economic impacts the proposal could have on Long Beach if it were approved.
More than two hours of public comment and council discussion were dedicated to the agenda item. The evening featured multiple Long Beach residents, most of whom were in support of the proposal, including Juana Melara, the Westin Long Beach housekeeper who was featured as Time Magazine’s 2017 Person of the Year, as one of the “Silence Breakers.”
In addition to the crowd’s impassioned comments, some of those at the dais, namely 2nd District Councilmember Jeannine Pearce, were adamant in their belief to pass the ordinance right away to ensure the protection of hotel workers in the city.
Debate between the councilmembers for a study to gather more information about the initiative’s economic impacts on the city and the hotel industry or to pass the ordinance immediately went on for several minutes, with a few of the councilmembers motioning different resolutions for the agenda item. Ultimately, the council found common ground and settled on moving the proposal to the November ballot.
As detailed on the City of Long Beach’s website, the initiative ordinance would amend the Long Beach municipal code to add workplace requirements and restrictions to local hotels containing more than 50 rooms.
If approved by voters, Long Beach hotels would supply employees with the aforementioned panic buttons and would be required to post notices of the procedure in guest rooms. The ordinance would also prohibit hotel employers from requiring a room cleaner to maintain more than 4,000 square feet of floorspace during an eight-hour work day, unless the employers pay twice the regular rate of pay for all hours worked. The ordinance would also prohibit a hotel employer from assigning an employee more than 10 hours during any work day, unless the employee provides written consent, according to the City’s ballot explanation.
(More information on the ballot initiative can be found here: bit.ly/2vTwCRW.)
Not all are supportive of the initiative, however. The Long Beach Hospitality Alliance published a press release this week that declared its opposition of the hotel ordinance, claiming that there could be harmful economic impacts. The press release also questioned the need for such an ordinance, claiming that many hotels in the city already use panic buttons.
“As an industry already heavily burdened with state and federal regulation, further operational costs incurred as a consequence of this initiative would be significant,” said Jeremy Harris, senior vice president of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, in the press release. “As new costs are incurred, and hotels look for new ways to remain financially solvent, hoteliers will be forced to raise room rates, shifting the tourism dollars associated with the highly profitable convention goers and tourists from our city to more competitive and cheaper markets.”
In May, the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs & A Healthy Community (Coalition) gathered the necessary 27,000-plus signatures from the community to place the measure on the Nov. 6 ballot. The city clerk’s office verified the numbers toward the end of July. The Coalition began its campaign to gather signatures in January, when it filed a notice of intent to the city clerk, as reported by the Signal Tribune earlier this year.
In September 2017, the Long Beach City Council had rejected a similar measure, known as the “Hospitality and Workload Safety Ordinance,” designed to provide hotel workers with protections. The council voted 5-4 against the proposal because of reservations regarding legal issues with the ordinance and how it could impact the city’s hotel industry.
In a phone interview Wednesday, Marlene Montanez, community organizer with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and the Coalition, said it was exciting to see so much community support at the council meeting Tuesday, but she also called it “draining” to have the survivors of assault have to recount their incidents and experiences during the public-comment portion of the agenda item.
She said the issue seemed to “fall on deaf ears for some of the council people,” also criticizing their choice to attach an economic-impact study to the initiative.
“We already passed the signatures to make it to the ballot,” she said. “In essence, council didn’t do anything. They failed to pass it on the spot, even though we had all the signatures. […] Voting for the study is basically saying, ‘Yes, we hear what you’re saying, but we care more about the costs that it’s going to put on ourselves than whatever your experience might be on what you’re sharing.’ That’s how I feel about it. You’re trying to put a value to people’s safety.”
Montanez also praised the efforts of two local hotels that recently negotiated contact agreements with labor union Unite Here Local 11 to provide similar worker protections that are illustrated in the ballot initiative.
This week, before the council’s vote, Unite Here Local 11 published a press release that states tentative agreements in contract negotiations with the Long Beach Hyatt Pike and the Long Beach Hyatt Regency hotels were reached to provide panic buttons and an increase in wages, benefits and retirement plans for their employees.
“We applaud those hotels,” Montanez said in response to the contract agreement. “[…] These are the workers advocating internally for their employer to give them those tools. So, we applaud the hotels and the workers, because now we know that at least these two hotels are doing it. And, I hope the rest of those hotels follow that example.”
She also clarified that protections go beyond just sexual harassment, emphasizing the need to protect employees from the physical demand of long shifts.
“Heavy workloads are a reality in the city, and we must decrease them,” she said, “because it’s not only about the sexual harassment, but there’s also a level of physical abuse with the amount of work these employees are expected to perform every day.”
As an organizer for the Coalition, Montanez has been recruiting community members to knock on doors in different districts in the city to gather the necessary signatures for the ballot initiative. Now that the hotel-protection ordinance will be under public review in November, the Coalition’s next step is to repeat the door-knocking process and inform residents about the importance of approving the proposal.
“This effort is not done solely by us; it’s done by the entire community participating as a whole,” Montanez said. “So, we know some of our other partners are going to have other issues on the November ballot, so we’re definitely going to be a coalition with a front, supporting each other and making sure that multiple initiatives get passed this November. We can’t only advocate for hotel workers, because there’s so many levels to the injustices that they face, not only in their homes, but out in the community. Yes, we’re glad this made it to the ballot, thanks to the community, but there is so much work that goes attached to it with our coalition.”
