[Livingwage] Fwd: The Battle for a Living Wage in Santa Monica

[Belden Fields]

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>Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2002 18:59:21 -0500
>Subject: The Battle for a Living Wage in Santa Monica
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>LA Weekly
>
>NOVEMBER 1 - 7, 2002
>
>Fair Pay Inside
>The battle for a living wage in Santa Monica
>
>By Edmund Newton
>
>WHEN YOU'RE STAYING AT THE SANTA Monica Doubletree
>Hotel, you just might want to step out of your $189-a-
>night ocean-view suite now and then. Don't worry about
>the soggy towels on the bathroom floor or the
>wastebasket holding yesterday's newspapers. You're the
>guest. Enjoy. Pop in to the 4th Street Grille
>downstairs, where you can have a plate of prosciutto
>and melon ($9.95) for openers, followed by, say, the
>tasty lamb chop au poivre ($21.95). Or just settle into
>a soft armchair in the hotel's airy main lobby and take
>in the eight-story blond-wood atrium and eye-catching
>art-deco banisters.
>
>Here's the best part. When you get back to your room,
>everything will be spit and polished. Your housekeeper
>-- the maid or the cleaning lady, for those who aren't
>familiar with the prosaic terminology of the hotel
>industry -- will have vacuumed the carpet, scrubbed the
>sink and toilet, stretched clean sheets on the bed so
>tight you can bounce a quarter on it, removed any trace
>of a fingerprint on the mirrors and done a few dozen
>other things to make the room as spiffy as the day you
>got there.
>
>The housekeeper in this instance might be Flora
>Andrade, 41, a calm, bespectacled woman who, by the end
>of the day, has the slogging demeanor of a battle-weary
>infantryman. The Guatemalan-born Andrade, who has
>worked for the Doubletree for almost seven years, lives
>in a $400-a-month apartment in South Los Angeles with
>her three sons and her mother. She and her family have
>never had the lamb au poivre. In fact, when she gets
>home at night, Andrade is so tired after cleaning her
>daily quota of 14 hotel suites that she can barely
>muster enough energy to rustle up the family's usual
>diet: beans or potatoes with eggs.
>
>It's Andrade and her fellow service workers in the
>Santa Monica hotel industry who stand to be the prime
>beneficiaries should Measure JJ pass on November 5. The
>so-called living-wage proposition seeks to use the heft
>of city investments to raise the hourly wage of service
>workers to between $10.50 and $12.25 an hour, depending
>on whether health benefits are included. The idea is
>that large businesses along the coastal commercial
>corridor of Santa Monica have benefited not only from
>about $180 million in public-works and redevelopment
>funds but, in the case of the hotels, from their status
>as a monopoly. Twelve years ago, Santa Monica voters
>decided to put a lock on more hotel development in the
>area. So, say proponents of JJ, let the working poor
>get some of the largess.
>
>The "sueldo digno," as Andrade calls the living wage,
>has been in the Santa Monica hopper for more than four
>years. Vivian Rothstein, director of Santa Monicans for
>Responsible Tourism (SMART), which is spearheading the
>Yes on JJ campaign, says she and others got the idea
>when they discovered that workers in luxury hotels were
>lining up at local food banks because they weren't
>making enough to make ends meet.
>
>"When there are two parents working full time and the
>family is still below the poverty level -- that's not
>just," Rothstein says. "Something's wrong."
>
>DESPITE SANTA MONICA'S REPUTATION as the prototype for
>progressive municipalities everywhere, it's not quite
>on the cutting edge in this case. The living wage has
>been around in one form or another for eight years, and
>more than 80 cities or counties, including Los Angeles,
>already have it. The difference here is that Santa
>Monica is the first to try to dictate a living wage to
>employers who aren't under contract with local
>government. The estimated 47 businesses affected by JJ,
>each of them grossing at least $5 million a year, don't
>work for the city. But the city, using vast
>redevelopment resources to make it easy to do business,
>has worked big time for them, or so goes the pro-JJ
>thinking. The hotels, which charge as much as $400 a
>night for a room, and other businesses should pay a
>little back.
>
>It has been a rough, combative campaign. There's
>history there. Two years ago, as the Santa Monica City
>Council tried to craft a living-wage ordinance, the
>beachfront hotels came up with their own version.
>Proposition KK, as it was called, used all the
>seductive rhetoric of social progressivism, but it was
>in fact a cunning attempt to pre-empt the council from
>taking any future action on the living wage. The
>measure was handed an overwhelming defeat by the
>discerning Santa Monica electorate. Then, after the
>City Council finally approved its own living-wage
>measure, the hotels and their allies successfully
>petitioned to have it put on the ballot. That's Measure
>JJ.
>
>The cast of characters here remains roughly the same.
>Proponents of JJ are led by the Hotel Employees &
>Restaurant Employees Union and the Los Angeles Alliance
>for a New Economy, a small social-action group that led
>the effort for Los Angeles' living wage. The opponents,
>under the banner of FAIR (Fighting Against
>Irresponsible Regulation) are once again dominated by
>the big hotels, which have raised most of the $1.8
>million that FAIR has thrown at the issue in two years.
>The Employment Policies Institute, a lobbying arm of
>the large restaurant chains and a partisan in numerous
>living-wage battles around the country, provides them
>with a theoretical basis for the campaign -- the hair-
>raising predictions about ways the living wage will
>devastate Santa Monica. And running the campaign once
>again is the Dolphin Group, a Westwood-based consultant
>firm specializing in conservative causes. It was the
>Dolphin Group that, among other things, helped to sink
>Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential bid with the famous
>Willie Horton ads, which exploited racial fears. ä
>
>THE BATTLE HAS BEEN WAGED ON TWO levels: on the
>sidewalks and in the halls of academia. If anything,
>the "battling economists," the academicians who are
>weighing in on either side, have been more contentious
>than the sidewalk soldiers. Rick Sander, the UCLA law
>professor who has become the anti-JJ coalition's
>leading pistolero, accuses economists on the other side
>of being shills for any living-wage measure that passes
>through the neighborhood, and they in turn berate him
>for his "dishonest" or "ad hominem" attacks.
>
>"It's an Excedrin headache," Mayor Pro Tem Kevin
>McKeown, a leader of the Yes on JJ group, says of the
>academic debate.
>
>In a nutshell, Sander, much of whose first report was
>financed by the Employment Policies Institute, says the
>measure will traumatize local businesses, sending some
>from profitability into red ink, and it will devastate
>the city itself, which will have to pick up the tab for
>millions of dollars in administrative expenses and
>losses in property and sales taxes. Besides, Sander
>contends, the prime beneficiaries of JJ will not be the
>working poor but comfortably middle-class workers.
>"It's a lot less efficient than shoving money out of a
>helicopter over L.A.," Sander says.
>
>Robert Pollin and Mark Brenner, the two University of
>Massachusetts economists commissioned by the city to
>study the measure's possible effects, concede that
>there will be some fallout from JJ: the loss of as few
>as three dozen jobs and a possible expense to the city
>of about $2.4 million in raises to city workers and
>administrative costs. But it dramatically raises the
>living standard for 2,000 workers, 85 percent of whom
>are members of the working poor, say Pollin and
>Brenner, in a report that was vetted by two prominent
>economic experts in the field and endorsed by 118
>economists.
>
>"By any reasonable measure, these are people who aren't
>meeting basic needs," Brenner says. "That's not what I
>call middle-class by any definition."
>
>Proponents say the predictions of shuttered businesses
>are grossly exaggerated. Still, the City Council has
>toned down JJ in response to criticisms, raising the
>cutoff level for employers from an annual gross of $3
>million to $5 million. That takes all but one
>restaurant out of play (reportedly, Broadway Deli) and
>reduces the total number of businesses affected from 72
>to 47. There's now also a hardship clause, allowing
>businesses to apply for exemptions. "It's not as if
>we're being wild-eyed radicals here," Rothstein says.
>
>IT'S NOT CLEAR WHO'S WINNING THE asphalt-level war.
>There's a phantom quality to FAIR's door-to-door
>campaign, which pro-JJ people call a classic
>"Astroturf" effort. FAIR lists its headquarters at an
>address on Wilshire Boulevard that turns out to be a
>mail drop. Spokesmen for the group claim they have a
>battalion of bellboys, waiters and housekeepers pushing
>opposition to JJ in Santa Monica's neighborhoods and
>manning phone banks. But none was made available for
>interviews.
>
>One Santa Monica woman says she got a call from a
>member of the opposition. "She said she wanted to give
>me three reasons not to vote for JJ," recalls Betty
>Mueller. "I said, 'Where are you calling from?' and she
>said, 'Texas.' I said, 'What do you know about this?'
>and she said, 'I'll let you talk to my supervisor.'
>Then she hung up."
>
>The Santa Monica Alliance To Protect the Living Wage,
>on the other hand, is a lively, garrulous presence in
>the neighborhoods. At its headquarters on Colorado
>Boulevard, a crowd of about 30 hotel workers, mostly
>Latinos, gathers for daily motivational meetings, then
>heads for the streets. On the wall is a chart showing a
>pyramid with the number 15,000 at the top. That's the
>number of "yes" commitments that will ensure passage of
>JJ. Last week, the hotel workers were about halfway
>there. The big challenge will be getting people to the
>polls in a year in which the gubernatorial race has
>been a big turnoff for voters, says field coordinator
>Roxana Tynan. "Low turnout hurts us," she says. "The
>people who always vote tend to be older and more
>conservative."
>
>On a canvassing run with Rocio Rojas, a union shop
>steward who buses dishes at a local restaurant, the
>going was rough. Trudging from building to building in
>a neighborhood of small apartment houses in the eastern
>part of the city, Rojas spent most of her time trying
>to persuade people through the buildings' intercom
>systems. "My name is Rocio and I'm a worker," she says.
>"I'd like your support for the living wage to help the
>workers."
>
>"The living way?" sputtered one impatient apartment
>dweller through the speaker.
>
>Judging by the responses of voters in the Vons parking
>lot on Lincoln Boulevard and Broadway the other day, JJ
>hasn't caught fire one way or the other yet. "Them
>hotels get $300 a night," said one grizzled resident,
>who wouldn't give his name. "The workers deserve more."
>But many still didn't know what the measure was.
>
>Andrade, who makes $9.95 an hour (actually more than
>most housekeepers, who can earn as little as $7.15), is
>not amused at being considered part of the comfortable
>middle class. She recently gave up her medical
>insurance, after Doubletree raised the employee share
>of the premium, even though her 6-year-old son has a
>partially blocked artery in his heart. She's still
>making $300-a-month payments on her 1987 Nissan, and
>with three boys in the family, two of them teenagers,
>there's always some pressing need, she says. "I tell
>them I can only buy for one of them from each
>paycheck," she says. The little one's $10 sneakers fell
>apart after a month of wear and tear.
>
>Andrade brings in about $350 a week when the hotel is
>busy, but her paycheck is often tied to the occupancy
>rate. When things are slow, she gets a call not to come
>in. If a guest stays in his room, not letting Andrade
>in to clean, she gets docked a half-hour's pay. For a
>while, she had a once-a-week job cleaning a family's
>home, but lost that after her hotel schedule was
>changed.
>
>When she gets home at night, she says, after an hour-
>and-a-half drive each way, "I'm too tired to play with
>my little boy."
>
>What would she do with the extra money if JJ passes?
>
>"More things for the children," Andrade says without
>hesitation. "More food. Más huevitos. More eggs."
>
>
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