Wages of Greed in Luxury’s Lap
Decisions, decisions, decisions.
I’m at the beach in Santa Monica, feeling a bit peckish and trying to decide where to eat.
The Seared Foi Gras with Fuji Apple and Vanilla Marmalade sounds good at Oceanfront in the Casa Del Mar. But the price of this appetizer--$19.75--makes my head spin. So I wander into the gift shop, which has a $40 herbal essence “eye pillow” near the $165 rhinestone belt.
The eye pillow is tempting, but a drink would do me just fine. So I stroll over to 1 Pico, where the Perrier-Jouet Grand Brut sounds refreshing. But at $14 a glass, or more than two hours pay for the dishwasher, maybe I better skip the cocktail and check out the restaurant down the street at the Loews Hotel.
Lavande has a Pan Crisped Loup de Mer with Basil Nage for $28, but at that price, I ought to have a clue what a Loup is, not to mention a Nage.
I know these are luxury resorts, but still. Maybe they’ve had to jack up the prices because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the hotels have kicked in to fight a “living wage” proposal for their employees.
That would explain the room prices too. I asked Shutters what it would cost to put me up for a night with an ocean view. The answer was $560. Or, if I wanted the suite, $1,500. I’d be better off at Casa Del Mar for $535.
That comes to about two weeks pay for the people sweeping the floors. But Santa Monica’s living wage ordinance, passed last month by the City Council after years of debate, sets a minimum wage of $10.50 an hour plus benefits beginning next summer for employees working in the coastal zone.
The idea of paying housekeepers and banquet staff this ungodly sum of $20,000 a year, which is roughly what it comes to, has the business community in a dither. They are hustling signatures for a referendum to repeal the ordinance. But living wage backers are literally hounding them in shopping center parking lots.
Is there greater sport in Southern California than watching capitalists and socialists duke it out on the streets of the People’s Republic of Santa Monica?
“I was working at a food bank, and I increasingly saw people coming in with full-time jobs who couldn’t afford to take care of their families,” says Vivian Rothstein of Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism.
Taxpayers get hit twice, Rothstein says. First, they’ve paid $180 million since 1985 to spruce up the coastal area, where hotels doubled their profits between 1993 and 1999 on the backs of low-wage help. And second, they pay social services for those workers, who can’t afford housing and medicine.
But the other side has some reasonable gripes too. The big hotels will be fine, says Tom Larmore of Fighting Against Irresponsible Regulation. But what about smaller businesses, like restaurants, retailers and movie theaters, which operate on smaller profit margins?
And what about the arbitrariness of the coastal zone boundaries? In some places, Larmore argues, competing businesses will be across the street from one another, one required to pay $10.50 an hour and the other paying $6.25.
Bob Buescher, general manager of the Holiday Inn on Colorado, wonders what business a City Council has telling private businesses what to pay employees. And he says lots of minimum wage staff take home tens of thousands more each year in tips.
Be that as it may, some critics would have you believe Santa Monica will be shuttered from the impact of the ordinance. But it only affects businesses that gross $5 million a year, exempting those that can prove hardship. And I don’t see how a few bucks more per hour for an estimated 2,000 employees is going to bring the Santa Monica economy crashing down on the beach. Particularly if they’re getting $19.75 for an appetizer.
The doomsaying makes sense, though, if you know who the anti-ordinance posse hired to handle their PR. It’s the same people who brought us the infamous Willie Horton ads in the 1988 presidential election. You remember those. Elect Michael Dukakis, and dangerous blacks will be sprung from prison to plunder and pillage.
Outside the Albertson’s at Lincoln and Ocean Park, City Councilman Kevin McKeown is pitching the merits of the ordinance to fellow Irishman Patrick Walsh, 74. Walsh, a retired sheet metal worker, isn’t buying it.
“I don’t agree that someone working at one hotel should get $12, and someone working at the other hotel up the street gets $7,” says Walsh, fudging the numbers a bit.
“The vast majority of low-wage workers are in the coastal zone, and we did the best we could for the most number of people,” says McKeown, who tells Walsh it’s a simple matter of economic justice for bottom-rung employees. The $10.50 is what a family of four needs to get off food stamps.
“Well, if they don’t like the job they’re in, why don’t they go get another one? I made minimum wage when I came to this country. Why don’t they go to school to better themselves?”
“Minimum wage was different back then,” McKeown argues. “If you’re at minimum wage today, you’ve got to work two and three jobs just to get by.”
Walsh isn’t budging. “If they don’t like it,” he says, “why don’t they go back to Mexico?”
McKeown gives it one last try. When his grandfather came over from Ireland, he says, signs in windows said, “Irish need not apply.” But the Irish took the toughest jobs and eventually worked their way up, and these folks doing laundry and cleaning toilets at the fancy hotels are no different, he argues.
“They’re us, Patrick. To me, they’re us!”
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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.
