Hotel Campaign Signals Labor’s Ascent in L.A.

Four hotel workers -- a cook from the Radisson, a housekeeper from the Sheraton, a telephone operator from the Westin and a laundry worker from the Hilton -- gathered on a recent afternoon in a small Lennox apartment near LAX. Together, they make $409 a day, less than a single decent City Hall lobbyist can earn in an hour.

And yet, Jose Navarro, Maria Morataya, Patricia Delgado and Maria Ceja represent a rising force in Los Angeles politics, their grievances increasingly heard in the corridors of influence, where their allies include a majority of the City Council and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Those workers and scores of others are part of an assertive campaign to unionize the hotels along Los Angeles’ Century corridor and to upgrade that undistinguished and seedy stretch that greets visitors as they arrive through Los Angeles International Airport.

There are 13 hotels along that length of Century Boulevard, which reaches east from the airport exit to the San Diego Freeway. The hotels are interspersed with fast-food restaurants, parking lots, gas stations and a notorious “live nude” establishment, its signature billboard a landmark of a sort.

Not one of the hotels employs union workers, and their wages are a source of continuing annoyance to the leaders of Los Angeles’ labor movement. On Feb. 3, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a labor-backed community group, kicked off a campaign intended to win a pay hike for the 3,500 employees of the Century Boulevard hotels, to facilitate their efforts to win union representation and to address the social and economic effects of low wages on the communities near the airport.

The pleas of hotel workers are hardly new in Los Angeles or elsewhere. But the growing power of Los Angeles labor and the unions’ imaginative use of it have made the corridor campaign a touchstone in the shifting balance of supremacy between employers and employees in this city, renowned for generations for its resistance to labor.

The Century corridor hotels are among the lowest-priced and busiest in Los Angeles. Many of their workers make minimum wage -- $6.75 an hour -- or a bit more and often are asked to pay for their own health insurance; many forgo the insurance because of its cost. Morataya, for instance, makes $8.22 an hour as a housekeeper for the Sheraton. Because she cannot afford the $270 to $300 a month that the company-offered health insurance would cost, she goes without it.

She paid the price for that risk earlier this year, however, when her 17-year-old daughter slipped and fell while feeling her way to the bathroom in the dark. The girl broke her hand, and it became infected. It took weeks to get an appointment with a doctor, and by then the infection had grown worse.

Finally, Morataya’s daughter was admitted to Harbor UCLA hospital, where she spent eight days. She is healthy again, but she faces a $37,000 bill, money she cannot imagine ever having.

“My daughter almost lost her hand,” Morataya said recently, as she and the other workers gathered around a paper plate of potato chips and a few pieces of fruit. “That is because we have to choose between food and health insurance.”

Among employees at the area’s hotels, such stories are common. Standing on the loading dock of the Hilton, Miguel Vargas, a waiter at the Hilton for 14 years, said he makes minimum wage and complained of shifting schedules that leave him no ability to take time off. His colleague, Immacula Rene, cleans 16 rooms a day but, in 10 years at the Hilton, has only gotten three raises. She worries about how to afford college for her children.

Moreover, the implications of those low-wage jobs ripple beyond the hotels. Because the Century Boulevard hotels are the rare Los Angeles employers whose workers generally live near their jobs, the effects of the wage structures are felt in Lennox, Hawthorne and Inglewood, communities that abut the airport. The Rev. Altagracia Perez, rector at the Holy Faith Church in Inglewood, said she sees hotel workers at her church’s food banks. Marisol Cruz, a member of the Lennox School District board, said she sees the effect on children who don’t get help with their schoolwork, who don’t have a parent at home with them in the afternoon or evening and who thus while away their time on the street.

Managers of the area hotels say they are sympathetic to the problems of their workers, but they also are irritated to find themselves the object of a union drive. They are fighting back.

Grant Coonley, who manages the Hilton, sent a memo to his employees decrying the effort. “I am annoyed at their tactics,” he wrote. “They try to ruin or hurt a business until it gives in to force employees to pay dues.”

Coonley accused Unite Here, a local hotel workers union, of hypocrisy and of brainwashing and urged workers not to be intimidated by it. A union, he predicted, would make crass appeals for public sympathy and mislead workers into thinking they could get better contracts than were possible.

Marc Grossman, senior vice president of corporate affairs for Hilton, said Coonley’s memo was “probably not as elegant as it could have been” but blamed that on the frustration of dealing with organizers. According to Grossman, the hotel would be happy to discuss wage increases for its workers but feels Unite Here has manipulated the organizing process by refusing to allow a secret ballot vote on representation. Unite Here says it believes secret ballot elections are time-consuming and susceptible to management control.

Were the Century corridor debate merely between workers and managers, City Hall might steer clear of it. But the hotels have their own objectives, the sprucing up of the corridor and construction of a conference center in the area. Such a center, they hope, would draw more conferences to the hotels and would cater to a clientele inclined to spend two or three nights rather than just one. That would help boost occupancy and perhaps allow the hotels to raise room rates.

Laurie Hughes, executive director of Gateway to L.A., a business improvement district that encompasses the hotels, said her organization has commissioned a study to examine the feasibility of the conference center and to determine whether it would attract new business or merely siphon off conventions using the downtown convention center.

“The long-overdue beautification and street improvements, together with the development of a conference center with a restaurant-and-retail component, will create an atmosphere attractive to both corporate and tourism dollars,” Hughes said in an e-mail follow-up to an interview with The Times.

Those plans require city government support, possibly a subsidy for the conference center, or at least assistance in reconfiguring the corridor for retail establishments. And where the city is needed, politics, in this case labor politics, are in play.

For most of its history, labor politics in Los Angeles amounted to periodic union drives thwarted by overwhelming business force. Los Angeles was built by a business oligarchy, much of it transplanted from the Midwest, that fashioned this city as a counterpoint to heavily unionized San Francisco. Here, those tycoons argued, businesses could locate without the threat of strikes or labor violence then common along the San Francisco docks. Under their leadership, Los Angeles took shape, its civic life self-consciously a rejection of big-city Eastern politics and government.

Today, the city’s historic Republican, anti-labor politics have given way to almost the exact opposite. Los Angeles is dominated by Democratic politicians and their labor allies. A onetime labor organizer lives in the mayor’s mansion. Most members of the City Council won their seats thanks in part to support from labor. These days, when the council meets in its historic horseshoe at City Hall, most members of the public are restrained behind the barrier that separates the council from its constituents. Labor representatives, however, are given passes, mingling freely with the council members and their staffs.

Business leaders, meanwhile, once harrumphed about unions; now, they are largely cowed by them. Indeed, the evidence of labor’s influence may be most strongly noticed not in its presence at the City Council so much as in the reticence of its critics. Business representatives today grumble about labor among themselves and in private conversations. Publicly, they restrict themselves to guarded acknowledgments that the ground has shifted.

“Over the past 10 to 15 years, labor’s strength in the public sector has vastly increased,” said George Kieffer, a lawyer who chaired the appointed Charter Reform Commission in the late 1990s and who is the recent past chairman of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. The business community, Kieffer added, is “probably growing in its concern” about the influence of public employee unions, both at the city and at the school district.

Even before taking office, Villaraigosa helped negotiate the conclusion to a standoff between labor and hotel managers outside the Century corridor. So, as the conflict between workers and hotels has moved to that part of the city, Villaraigosa is eyeing it closely. First he wants to be sure that the proposed conference center would not hurt the city’s convention center; if that’s not a problem, then Villaraigosa would like to work out something for the Century hotels and their workers.

“My commitment to trade and tourism is resolute,” he said in an interview last week. “But I also believe that when an industry is doing well, the employees who make up that industry ought to benefit.”

In the corridor, he said, “we’re hoping for a win-win, where business and workers both do well.”

Councilman Bill Rosendahl, who represents the area, also strikes a neutral tone in the corridor debate. He wants to remain a broker between labor and management, and he stresses that he sees both the hotels and their workers as his constituents. That said, Rosendahl notes fondly that he received labor support in his council race, and he recalls that Maria Elena Durazo, who leads the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, spoke highly of the public affairs television show for which he was host before he ran for City Council.

As for a possible deal that would give the hotels their conference center and require a wage increase for workers, Rosendahl sees potential.

“One hand,” he observed, “washes the other.”