New Push for Hotel Worker Rehiring Rights, By Jondi Gumz

COMMUNITY NEWS New Push for Hotel Worker Rehiring Rights

By Jondi Gumz

When COVID-19 struck Santa Cruz County last year, it hit the hospitality sector hard. Some 10,000 jobs at hotels and restaurants — a tenth of the county’s jobs — were lost by April.

With safety restrictions on travel, hotels and restaurants, only half of those jobs have returned.

On Friday, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) introduced Assembly Bill 1074, supported by hotel workers and their union, UNITE HERE Local 11, to make sure that when their employers resume operations, hospitality workers can return to work.

The bill focuses on hotel workers in guest services, food and beverage, cleaning and building maintenance as well as subcontracts for those services. temporary staffing and successor employers in case of an ownership change.

“California’s hospitality workforce has been decimated by COVID-19, and these employees deserve basic protections which will allow them to return to the jobs and wages they earned before the pandemic as the industry reopens,” Sen. María Elena Durazo (D-Los Angles), principal co-author of AB 1074, said. “This bill effectively addresses the concerns Gov. Newsom raised to our prior effort.”

Last year, Durazo, Gonzalez and Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) authored AB 3216, a right to recall and Workers laid off from resort jobs in southern California support AB 1074 to get rehiring rights. retention bill that would have required employers to give a former employee the name of who was hired in their place and the reasons why. It passed but Newsom voted it, saying it required sharing too much personal information of hired employees.

“Latinos have made up the backbone of the hospitality industry for decades. Many stayed with the same employers for years in order to work their way up and earn a stable living,” Gonzalez said. “When hotels and event centers can safely reopen, the least we must do is ensure workers can return to the jobs they previously held.”

She joined dozens of workers who caravanned from Los Angeles and Orange County to La Jolla for a press conference outside the corporate headquarters of JC Resorts, which owns and operates hotels and golf courses, including Terranea Resort in Ranchos Palos Verdes. That resort terminated much of its workforce amid the pandemic, without making a binding commitment to rehire longtime workers when the hotel reopened, according to Unite Here Local 11. “Terranea Resort terminated us during the pandemic and took away our health care when we needed it most,” said Antonio Rodriguez, who worked as a banquet server at the Terranea Resort for 10 years and was recently hospitalized due to COVID-19. “My right to go back to work will ensure that I can get back on my feet and give my wife and three young girls a better future. Right now, I fear not being able to pay my bills and rent after my young daughter was in the hospital for kidney failure… I must return back to work for my family.”

In June, Terranea told the Orange County Register staffing reductions and salary cuts were essential to the resort’s survival, and that furloughed employees would be recalled based on seniority.

Unite Here contends the bill is needed to prevent discriminatory hiring practices designed to cut costs by replacing longtime employees with a less experienced workforce at lower rates of pay.

Current law includes the Displaced Janitor Opportunity Act, which requires contractors and subcontractors awarded contracts to provide janitorial or building maintenance services at a particular jobsite or sites, to retain for 60 days employees employed by the previous contractor.

AB 1074 would extend that protection to hotel workers. Laid-off workers not given the opportunity would be able to file a complaint seeking hiring and reinstatement, with the potential for front or back pay being awarded.

Nearly 40 percent of all California jobs lost during the pandemic have been in the hospitality industry.

San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Clara have already passed ordinances to ensure hospitality workers have the right to return to their previous jobs. n

“Recall” from page 7 “Minimum Wage” from page 9

So, they have to construct a representative sample based on sophisticated use of variables like age, gender, location, education, etc.

What this method does know for sure is they’re dealing with actual voters and even how often they have voted, all of which is in the voter file.

There are many more issues that confront pollsters using either method. Needless to say, polling has become a hugely difficult endeavor, which the most recent presidential campaign revealed starkly.

But this much we know for certain: Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing voters who no longer thinks he’s the bee’s knees.

And the only way he can guarantee survival in office is to make people believe that California is doing a better job of containing the coronavirus, distributing vaccine, opening schools and businesses and slowing the death toll. n

Underlying the budgetary estimates are CBO’s projections of how pay would change for people directly or potentially affected by an increase in the minimum wage — that is, people who would otherwise have been paid hourly wages that were less than the proposed new minimum or slightly above it — and how changes in pay would affect the number of people employed. • From 2021 to 2031, the cumulative pay of affected people would increase, on net, by $333 billion — an increased labor cost for firms considerably larger than the net effect on the budget deficit during that period. • That net increase would result from higher pay ($509 billion) for people who were employed at higher hourly wages, offset by lower pay ($175 billion) because of reduced employment.

In an average week in 2025, the year when the minimum wage would reach $15 per hour, 17 million workers whose wages would otherwise be below $15 per hour would be directly affected, and many of the 10 million workers whose wages would otherwise be slightly above that wage rate would also be affected. At that time, the effects on workers and their families would include: • Employment would be reduced by 1.4 million workers, or 0.9 percent, according to CBO’s average estimate; and • The number of people in poverty would be reduced by 0.9 million.

This report also provides CBO’s estimates of its effects on spending for major health care programs, unemployment compensation, Social Security, nutrition programs, other mandatory spending; plus effects on revenues, discretionary outlays for wages of federal workers; net spending for interest; and uncertainty surrounding the budgetary estimates.

The report covers effects on employment, wages of affected workers, distribution of family income, real (inflation-adjusted) output, pries, distribution of labor and capital income and interest rates. n