The Los Angeles International Airport’s airlines, hotels and franchise companies alliance submitted paperwork Thursday, forcing a citywide vote to a new ordinance that would hike the minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to $30 an hour in 2028.
The group, known as the Los Angeles Tourism, Employment and Progress Alliance, hopes to convince voters to repeal the ordinance. But first, the alliance needs to collect about 93,000 signatures in 30 days to get the voting measures in the upcoming elections.
League spokesman Phil Singer said the wage increase “threatening income needs in Los Angeles” and was the host of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“Small businesses will be forced to close, workers will be unemployed, and the economic impact will extend throughout the city,” Singh said in an email. “We are fighting for all this: the future of the city, the work that sustains our communities and the millions of tourism industries that serve proudly every year.”
The new voting measures campaign only comes two days after Mayor Karen Bass signed the minimum wage legislation as law.
The wage regulations are strongly opposed by a series of Los Angeles business organizations that believe it has increased wages too much, too quickly in the tourism industry. However, it is welcomed by unions representing hotel and airport employees, which support many politicians who support the measure.
Singh said the league’s campaign committee has received substantial funding from Delta, United and the American Hotel and Accommodation Association. The organization’s petition has been submitted to the Municipal Clerk’s Office and signed by five businessmen, including Greg Plummer, the operator of a loose franchise company; Mark Beccaria, a hotel partner with Angeleno in the West Side of Los Angeles; and Alec Mesropian, the organization’s advocacy manager, is known as Bizfed.
The alliance is targeting a law that plans to raise the hourly minimum wage to $22.50 on July 1 for butlers, parking attendants and hotel restaurant workers as well as Lax Skycaps, luggage handlers and concession employees. Wages will jump to $25 in 2026 and will be $27.50 in 2027.
The wage increase was led by Unite of Local 11, Hotel and Restaurant Union, and by international joint service workers representing private sector airport workers.
Unite Local 11 co-president Kurt Petersen called the company’s proposal “shameful” and promised his union members would be “on the street” and “on the street toe” with the alliance’s signature party members.
“The greed in the hospitality industry is infinite,” Peterson said. “They would rather spend millions of people asking them to sign the petition than pay their workers to live in Los Angeles.
Under the city’s law, hotel and airport workers are at a minimum wage higher than those employed by other industries.
The minimum hotel wage approved by the commission in 2014 is currently $20.32 per hour. The minimum wage for private sector employees at LAX is $25.23 per hour, which includes $5.95 per hour for health care payments.
For almost everyone in Los Angeles, the minimum wage is $17.28 per hour, 78 cents higher than the state. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
Supporters of airport and hotel minimum wage hiking said they will help some of the region’s lowest-paid workers cover the rise in rent and food, while also providing them with more disposable income that can be spent locally, thus providing growth for the region’s economy.
Critics say it will undermine the Los Angeles tourism efforts to restore business declines caused by the Covid-19 outbreak five years ago. They believe the ordinance will lead to layoffs and also enable new hotel development.
The ordinance also requires airports and hotel businesses to provide hourly health care payments (except for the minimum wage), which is $7.65 from July and is expected to rise every year. (Until 2026, hotels will be exempt from this requirement.)
Once health care needs are included, some businesses will be required to pay workers an additional 60% over a three-year period.
