Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo
Striking hotel workers rally outside the InterContinental Hotel after walking off the job early Sunday, July 2, 2023, in downtown Los Angeles.
As Mark Kreidler reported in these pages a few weeks back, members of UNITE HERE Local 11, who staff hotels in Los Angeles and Orange County, marched with members of the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild in downtown Los Angeles in May, in front of delegates gathered for the state Democratic convention. The writers were already on strike; hotel workers and actors were putting Democrats and their bosses on notice that they would have no hesitation joining them if their contract demands were not met.
The first shoe dropped in my home city yesterday. As around 100,000 curiosity seekers stalked the downtown convention center for Anime Expo, North America’s largest gathering for manga and cosplay enthusiasts, at least 15,000 workers at UNITE HERE hotels walked off the job, protesting low pay and benefits in what is likely to end up as the largest hotel worker strike in U.S. history. The Indigo, InterContinental, DoubleTree, Hotel Figueroa, Proper Hotel, and the Biltmore, all near the convention center, were being picketed; if the expansive Westin Bonaventure, the biggest employer of the bunch, didn’t reach a contract agreement last week, the action would have been even bigger.
Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA decided to extend their negotiations to July 12, after their contract expired last Friday. As Harold Meyerson has reported, what seemed like a looming agreement was cut off by some of the biggest stars in TV and film, demanding better terms on streaming production, safeguards on the use of artificial intelligence, and lower burdens on early-career actors (who now typically tape their own auditions at their own expense). “No one should mistake this extension for weakness,” said SAG-AFTRA leaders last Friday.
Hotel workers and creative workers have vastly different demands, but they’re battling the same unforgiving system, in which they are seen as cogs. Since the pandemic, hotels across America have seen cuts, with workers forced to do more with less help. (The Bonaventure deal included rehiring cleaning staff at pre-pandemic levels.) Dishwashers and bellhops and cleaning staff in Southern California endure commutes of up to two hours because they can’t afford housing any closer. The middle class among actors and writers has been hollowed out as well, an especially precarious situation in a company town. Streaming has broken the market, and the studios’ response has been to gut labor, with smaller writers’ rooms and stingier residuals and a dalliance with using computers instead of humans to create entertainment.
These workers represent the economic engine of America’s second-largest city, which thrives on tourism and creative productions. West Coast dockworkers just reached an agreement last month to avert a third bulwark, logistics, from slowing down amid labor strife. Other workers have been activated as well; organizing has led to labor wins by school personnel at L.A. Unified, ticket takers and groundskeepers at Dodger Stadium, and strippers at a club in North Hollywood. It’s become impossible for the people who make these industries run to live and work in the city.
There’s something appropriate about this hot labor summer coinciding with the nation’s birthday. Here we have people of different backgrounds, different classes, uniting to fight corporate power and win a chance to share in the prosperity they create. That was part of the impulse behind the resistance to English colonization, taking on concentrated wealth and monopolistic corporations. And it’s happening in the city that best exemplifies the melting pot, the polyglot huddle of races and ethnicities. Too often in Los Angeles those people are separated, by gates and hedges and freeways. This summer, they’ve been thrown together in a common fight. It’s enough to make you feel a little patriotic.
We’ll be off tomorrow. Happy Independence Day.
