The Long Beach City Council denied their proposed ordinance last year, but that rejection has not stopped a group that is determined to ensure the city has clearly defined protections in place for local hotel workers.
On Jan. 25, the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs & A Healthy Community (Coalition) filed with the city clerk’s office a notice of intent to circulate an initiative petition for a proposed ballot measure regarding working conditions of hotel employees.
Although hotel industry representatives have characterized the proposal as a union power move, Victor Sanchez, director for the Coalition, a division of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), which is pushing for the ordinance, explained that his group’s efforts are simply focused on “workplace protections.”
“It’s been a three-year campaign to try and get protections against sexual and physical abuse for hotel workers in the hospitality industry in Long Beach,” he said. “This past September, we had our ordinance come up to the council for a vote, and the council failed to pass the measure by one vote. […] Everyone involved in it was definitely heartbroken, but, I think, after reflecting on the campaign, and with the rise of the ‘Me Too’ movement, and shortly thereafter— I think it was about two weeks after the vote when the Harvey Weinstein stuff started to grow and, obviously, more and more stories started to come out— our team members became emboldened, and we started thinking, ‘Well, we weren’t wrong. We were right on this issue, and there’s a need to continue to do advocacy on it.”
Sanchez added that, when he and his colleagues were considering next steps to take, the ballot measure quickly became a direction they wanted to move in. They wrote a slightly different version for the ballot proposal.
“One of the big differences is we’re trying to expand the reach of these protections to as many hotels as possible,” Sanchez said, adding that the original proposal covered hotels with 100 or more rooms, whereas the new one applies to ones with 50 or more.
“You’ll see that some of the language is fairly similar in terms of making sure there are panic buttons, making sure there’s a process for the hotel keepers to be reassigned, for example, a floor if they run into an incident [and] that there are adjustments in terms of the amount of space that housekeepers are working,” Sanchez said. “What we’ve seen is that the total number of hotel rooms and units in Long Beach has increased, but the number of workers has stayed the same.”
He said many Long Beach hotel workers have complained that they are being asked to work an inordinate amount of hours, and he pointed to one incident involving Claudia Sanchez, a 20-year-old dishwasher at the Renaissance Hotel who collapsed and fell into a coma after working a 14-hour work day in 2015.
“That’s why the law was popularly known as Claudia’s Law while we were running it through the city council,” he said. “So, for us, the language is very much the same, and it’s really about expanding the opportunity for the hotel workers, who are mostly immigrant women of color, to have the opportunity to be protected in the workplace.”
When asked for his reaction to a comment made by Jeremy Harris, senior vice president of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and its liaison to the Long Beach Hospitality Alliance, in another media source that indicated the issue is not about safety, Victor Sanchez said such statements are part of the problem.
“I think that when you try to sugarcoat or try to divert attention from safety— which is exactly what this thing is about— it’s frustrating and disappointing,” he said. “And I think that’s why there’s a need for women to be heard and for the stories to be validated. When you have people trying to distract from what it is that we’re actually trying to do, I think it contributes to the larger problem that we’re seeing.”
(The Signal Tribune made numerous attempts to reach Harris for comment, however, despite an emailed reply from him indicating he was willing to respond, was never able to acquire his remarks by press time.)
Marlene Montanez, the community organizer for the Coalition, said the proposed measure addresses work loads and sexual harassment, particularly because of a continuing taboo related to reporting incidents of a sexual nature.
“I think it’s very important that we start taking that fear away from women in wanting to report,” Montanez said. “Even if they choose not to report, to create a pathway for them to feel like they’re in a safe space when they’re at work. I can’t tell you the amount of times hotel workers were expressing more new demand in their jobs than in their whole life. I think that speaks a lot to the amount of assault they’re exposed to in their job place.”
Montanez explained that the idea of panic buttons stemmed from her organization’s research into other industries and other cities.
“A lot of mental-health and physical-health facilities actually offer this since they’re dealing so much with the public,” she said. “We thought this makes sense since they’re dealing with a lot of things and there’s hardly anyone around them […] A panic button would be one of the ways to prevent them being exposed to violence.”
In an opinion piece entitled “Local hotels taking sexual harassment seriously” in another news publication, Harris wrote that the Long Beach Hospitality Alliance and its member hotels continue to work with law-enforcement, nonprofits and regulators to educate and train employees about preventing and reporting sexual harassment, human trafficking and workplace violence. He added that some hotels have purchased and implemented panic buttons, training employees to use them and working with city and law-enforcement leaders on their implementation.
Harris also wrote that many of the safety tools are expensive and require significant employee training time in order to be implemented correctly but that the investment is the right thing to do.
In an emailed response to the Signal Tribune Monday, Amy Webber, deputy city attorney, explained the steps in the process for the Coalition to get the measure on the ballot in November.
Webber indicated that, now that the proponents have paid the $200 filing fee, the city clerk transmitted to her office a request to prepare a ballot title and summary.
California Elections Code section 9203 requires that the proponents be provided with a ballot title and summary within 15 days of filing their notice of intent to circulate their petition. Under state law, the city attorney may only summarize the measure, without providing any opinions or raising any issues as to legality, according to Webber.
“After that, the proponents must comply with other elections code requirements prior to circulation of the petition,” Webber wrote. “This includes notice, posting and publication requirements. Thereafter, the proponents will have up to 180 days to circulate the petition to make the November ballot.”
Webber added that the group will need 10 percent of the registered voters’ signatures, and the city clerk has estimated that number to be approximately 27,000.
