In the months preceding the Los Angeles City Council’s vote to gradually improve tourism industry workers’ wages to $30 an hour, the hotel and developer lobbies threw everything they had into pushing one apocalyptic message: Paying higher wages would prompt the businesses to retrench, downsize operations and abandon projects in and around the city.
They brought the heat. The Hotel Association of Los Angeles warned the local Olympic organizing committee that it might not be able to honor contracts to furnish rooms for the 2028 L.A. Games. One property company said its investors would kill a planned expansion of a Hilton in Universal City if the higher wage kicked in. Another chief executive asserted that the city “has been crossed off the map by investors” in hotel projects.
