Group pursues jobs law
Workers rally for right-to-return ordinance
Labor union members across several industries in Nevada are fighting for the right to return to work.
The Save Our Jobs union coalition gathered Tuesday morning to rally for the placement of a Right to Return ordinance on the Clark County Commission’s Sept. 1 agenda. The ordinance would require employers to offer workers the right to return to their jobs after being laid off or furloughed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, once the business reopens and operations resume.
Most local Culinary union contracts say employers must recall a laid-off worker by seniority before hiring anyone new when a full-time position in his or her job classification returns. This right to be recalled typically lasts six months or a year from the last day the employee worked, depending on the contract, according to the Culinary Local 226 website.
Low demand for travel means “thousands of hotels” won’t be able to pay their mortgages and could be forced to close their doors for good, stated Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association.
“Tens of thousands of hotel employees will lose their jobs and small business industries that depend on these hotels to drive local tourism and economic activity will likely face a similar fate,” Rogers said.
UNLV finance and gaming professor Toni Repetti is somewhat skeptical banks are itching to foreclose on hotels at a time when there’s unlikely to be much demand to buy it off their books.
“If you don’t know when your customer is going to come back, then why would you buy a hotel?” she said.
However, she said, hotel man
agers are asking Congress for help to protect themselves from the possibility of foreclosure and keep on the thousands of people they employ.
‘Writing on the wall’
The HOPE Act would represent the first federal pandemic legislation with a real-estate focus and could provide a much-needed boost to the hotel industry, said Brendan Bussman, partner at Global Market Advisors.
Hotels in Nevada were forced to close for two months and many, upon reopening, are unable to operate as they did before the pandemic hit.
“That’s where I think the HOPE Act’s goal is to try to fill that gap for those that (are) trying to recover and have been limited in their ability to recover because of current health and safety conditions,” Bussman said.
Few smaller or independent hotels, if any, have the savings to withstand zero income over the
course of months, Bussman said. Corporate-owned hotels may be better positioned to ride out “the tsunami that the industry has faced because of the pandemic,” but even they may not all be spared the possibility of shuttering, he said.
Erdem said a large hotel on the Strip brings in most of its revenue from gaming, with assists from dining and drinking; smaller hotels don’t have that luxury. They rely almost entirely on room revenue, and when there are no festivals, conventions or any of the other mass gatherings that draw people to Southern Nevada, they’re not making any money.
Foreclosures are an unfortunate reality on the horizon for some smaller hotels, he said. And it’s more difficult to close and reopen than it is to stay open.
“If this trend continues, I mean, the writing is on the wall,” he said.