Hotel, Restaurant Workers Overwhelm Relief Center
Labor and community groups on Wednesday opened the first of three temporary relief centers in the Los Angeles area for hotel and restaurant workers hit by a wave of layoffs since the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks caused a tourism slump.
Aid volunteers quickly were overwhelmed with requests for food and financial assistance at the center at St. Clement’s Catholic Church in Santa Monica. The initial stock of groceries ran out in less than an hour.
“This is only going to get worse,” community services worker Carmen Montoya said as she scribbled notes from a long line of applicants. Some could not pay utility bills; others had already received eviction notices.
Montoya could provide some with emergency funds from the United Way, but she feared that the money would soon run out. “We are in trouble here,” she said.
More than 3,000 unionized hotel and restaurant employees in Los Angeles have lost their jobs or are working severely reduced hours since tourism collapsed last month, said Maria Elena Durazo, president of Local 11 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union.
The overall number of affected hotel workers locally could reach 15,000, aid workers said. “We are already in a crisis,” Durazo said as the Santa Monica center opened to several hundred applicants who learned about it through handbills. “These are the most vulnerable workers in our economy. They work paycheck to paycheck. They have nothing to fall back on.”
Among them was Soledad Garcia, who lost her job as a housekeeper at the Pacific Shores Hotel in Santa Monica and had to give up her own apartment. She now shares a one-bedroom apartment with seven relatives.
She said she has applied at more than a dozen hotels and restaurants, and has distributed fliers soliciting housecleaning work but has had no luck. “I’m desperate,” she said. “The end of the month is coming and I don’t know how I will pay the bills.”
Maria Santana, who also cleaned rooms, lost her job at the Beverly Hilton in mid-September. The single mother of three said she is expecting unemployment benefits of about $90 a week but prefers to find another job. “Everywhere I go, it’s the same thing,” she said. “Everyone is cutting hours, letting people go.”
The Santa Monica relief center at 3102 3rd St. will be open from 1 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays. Two other centers will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays, beginning today. They are at 4634 W. Imperial Highway in Inglewood and 321 S. Bixel St. in downtown Los Angeles. For information, call (310) 451-9703.
‘These are the most vulnerable workers in our economy. They work paycheck to paycheck. They have nothing to fall back on.’
