Well, UNITE-HERE Local 11, the hotel workers’ union run by DPOC chief Ada Briceño, really reached for the moon this time, with their “Hotel and Event Center Worker Protection, Retention and Minimum Wage” initiative planned for the November 2024 ballot. Will Anaheim’s people support a 60% wage hike to $25 an hour for these vital workers who’ve been generally making $17? We’ll see in a year and a half.
Last night the Council had three choices – 1) immediately adopt this initiative as an ordinance; 2) immediately vote to put it on next year’s ballot (which they’ll have to eventually do anyway) or 3) FIRST commission an “economic impact study” of what’s likely to happen if the initiative goes through. The two Council Democrats, Mayor Ashleigh and Councilman Carlos, supported option 1 but were predictably outvoted by the five Disney/SOAR councilmembers. After that the option of the economic impact study passed unanimously.
There is a lot more in this initiative than just the wage hike to $25 an hour (with of course yearly cost-of-living increases.) There are 14 pages of complex, nearly incomprehensible workplace rules – as far as we can tell, a worker who has to work on two different floors has to get DOUBLE time – $50 an hour! And much more. There’s a stipulation that workers need to be retained 90 days after a hotel changes owners, which sounds reasonable. And most notably there’s a worker safety provision for maids to have panic buttons for when they feel threatened by a...
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