The real scandal in Los Angeles is what is legal
Los Angeles city government is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation into public corruption, but as writer Michael Kinsley once observed, the scandal is what's legal.
Powerful special interests are now writing their own self-serving initiatives and getting them adopted as law without even the bother of putting them on the ballot.
Unite Here Local 11, a union that represents Southern California hotel employees, wrote a ballot measure and collected more than 110,000 signatures on a petition to get the measure on the Nov. 8 ballot. In late June, the L.A. City Council voted to skip the election process and just adopt the measure as law. It takes effect in about a month, long before the November ballots would even have been printed.
Unite Here's measure requires hotels to manage housekeeping operations differently. Most hotels in the city of Los Angeles will have to reinstitute daily cleaning of rooms, unless guests specifically request to opt out. During the pandemic, many hotels eliminated daily housekeeping services unless guests requested them.
In addition, hotels with 45 or more guest rooms will have to limit the number of rooms that housekeepers are required to clean during an eight-hour workday. The new ordinance also expands the reach of an earlier minimum-wage ordinance that applied to hotels with 150 or more rooms; it will now apply to hotels with as few as 60 rooms. Under the new ordinance, housekeepers may not be required to work more than 10 hours in one shift unless they consent in writing. And a voluntary program of offering “panic button” alarms to housekeepers is now a mandate that hotels must supply them.
These are the sorts of provisions that could be expected to be negotiated in a collective bargaining process, but in Los Angeles, that's just not necessary. Instead, the union-owned-and-operated City Council will ratify whatever contract demands the union writes into an initiative and make them law.
If the measure went on the ballot, the hotel industry could oppose it with advertising that pointed out the consequences of increasing costs. Hotels in Los Angeles will become more expensive, resulting in less-competitive bids for conventions, events and group tours. Hotels throughout Southern California were hard-hit by pandemic closures, and raising costs now, with inflation already raging and driving up prices, could end very badly for hotel owners and their employees.
But we'll never see that ad campaign, because it's less expensive to buy a City Council member than it is to advertise on local L.A. television stations.
It's a great business, being on the L.A. City Council, where you can sell your vote without reducing your inventory of votes to sell. With the exception of council members Paul Krekorian, Joe Buscaino and John Lee, who voted no, the members of the council happily adopted the Unite Here measure and a second initiative written by the unions that represent health care workers. (Lee recused himself from that vote due to his role on the board of a hospital.)
The measure backed by SEIU-UHW requires an increase in the minimum wage for workers at privately owned hospitals. The new $25-an-hour minimum will apply to nurses, housekeepers, janitors, guards, aides and anyone who is not a supervisor or manager, at privately owned acute-care hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and other facilities that are part of those hospitals. It will not apply to community clinics and public health facilities.
The City Council did not bother with an economic analysis of the hotel worker or healthcare worker measures. There's simply no need for an analysis of economic effects — or unintended consequence — when political supporters come calling for the favors they earned by spending a lot of money to get a city official elected, not to mention their get-out-the-vote efforts and other manpower-intensive political operations.
A third city initiative that would put a massive tax on real estate sales of properties valued above $5 million, which includes apartment and commercial buildings, will have to go before voters in November. That initiative was written to benefit the providers of housing and services for the homeless. You have to wonder if those organizations foolishly skipped a fundraising dinner. Or if they were outbid.