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...
The Justice Department announced Friday International Business Machines Corp. will pay more than $17 million to resolve allegations that it violated anti-discrimination requirements in its federal...