While hotel workers—supported by clergy, City Councilwoman Janice Hahn and the Los Angeles Alliance for A New Economy—held a prayer vigil outside the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, lawyers on both sides of the issue are in the process of preparing briefs to convince a judge that the new living wage ordinance approved by the council and signed by the mayor is or is not “essentially different” from an ordinance approved last December.

Judge Dzintra Janavs last week granted a motion by hotel owners and their business community supporters that publication of the “Living Wage Ordinance” approved by the city council last month be postponed while she hears arguments in the matter.
The stay of publication means that nearly 3,500 workers in 12 Century Boulevard corridor hotels will have to wait to see if the proposed ordinance will go into effect. Another ordinance, which required the hotels to pay workers either $9.39 an hour with benefits or $10.64 without, was rescinded by the city council after a coalition of business owners collected enough signatures to submit the issue to a vote of the people.

Councilwoman Hahn, who spoke at the prayer vigil, said that “in the spirit of cooperation” which she thinks was generated because polls showed that more than 70 percent of people supported increasing the worker’s wages, the two sides sat down and hammered out an agreement that offered a number of incentives to owners as well as a phased-in implementation of the living wage.

But Paul Gough of the law firm Bell McAndrews & Hiltachk said the hotel owners walked out of the negotiations. According to the Sherman Oaks lawyer, who represented the hotels before Judge Janavs, the key issue deals with the text of the ordinance. “If you look at the text of the living wage portion, for all intents and purposes they are identical,” asserted Gough. “The problem here is that the referendum right is a constitutional right. They went out and spent money, gathered signatures, turned them in; and the (city council) passed essentially the same piece of legislation, nullifying our constitutional right of referendum.”

But a spokesperson for the city, in defense of the ordinance, countered that it is different and pointed to the fact that in the second version, the living wage would be phased in beginning July 1, instead of taking effect immediately. The new ordinance also established a workforce development plan to provide free training to workers; sets aside money for marketing the hotels as part of a new airport Hospitality Enhancement Zone and more.

While seven of the 13 hotels in the Century Bouelvard corridor have signed on to the lawsuit, there is at least one establishment that is paying its employees the living wage proposed in the city’s ordinance.
“We supported the living wage even before it went into law. We took over the property on December 12 and started paying a living wage to line employees,” said Onofre Gallegos, general manager of the Sheraton Four Points. Gallegos said that after reviewing the wages of workers such as housekeepers, they decided to give a 10 percent wage increase, even before the living wage was proposed. Once it came into being, he said their wages were in line with the requirements in the legislation.

“Obviously we agree that government should not be involved in telling private industry what to do, but when we looked at the living wage it was in line with our increase,” added Gallegos.
At the prayer vigil, Councilwoman Hahn said there were 14 areas where the current ordinance differed from the original and pointed out that the government intrudes in private industry all the time. “The state government sets minimum wage. We give public subsidies to private businesses; and the whole tax reform (just passed in 2004) helped private businesses.

“I have never in my whole life seen anyone work so hard against doing the right thing,” said Hahn about the lawsuit during the rally. The legislator accused the hotel owners of not bargaining in good faith, and told workers and their supporters “we will prevail.”