San Diego labor unions call on city to mandate $25 minimum wage for hotel and other service workers (2024)

Labor unions representing thousands of hotel, janitorial and convention workers are calling on the San Diego City Council to boost the pay of lower-paid service employees to $25 an hour — a nearly 50 percent increase over the current citywide minimum wage.

Union members are planning a mile-long march to City Hall on Wednesday, May 1, to highlight a requested wage ordinance that would cover a broad swath of employers, from hotels and the San Diego Convention Center to Petco Park, Pechanga Arena and tech companies like Qualcomm.

Though the largest focus of the proposed San Diego Service Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance is on the city’s hotel workers, the legislation also encompasses janitor and security personnel at biotech and technology companies, as well as employees at “event centers,” which can include concert halls, stadiums, arenas and convention centers.

More specifically, the draft ordinance defines event center employees as those working in food preparation, ushering, ticket-taking, concessions and parking structures.

Brigette Browning, president of the hotel workers union Unite Here Local 30 and head of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, estimated the number of affected hotel workers at 8,000. Their hourly pay, she said, currently ranges from $16.85 — San Diego’s minimum wage — to $28.

In a city like San Diego where the cost of living remains high, service workers are struggling to get by financially, Browning said.

“Frankly, they’re making decisions about whether they’re buying food or paying rent,” she said. “Where we represent the most workers — in downtown and in Coronado — our dishwashers and room attendants are going to be at $24 an hour this year, so I think we’ve done a very good job at lifting our members up. But if we’re surrounded by hotels that are paying significantly less, it’s putting downward pressure on what we’re able to get going forward.”

Similar measures predictably have received pushback from the hotel industry, and it’s likely this one will be no different.

Robert Gleason, president and chief executive of San Diego-based Evans Hotels, which owns The Lodge at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, said it’s unfair to single out a particular industry for higher hourly wages, especially when the tourism industry hasn’t fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though recent visitor spending has eclipsed figures recorded before the pandemic, the number of hotel rooms booked and the volume of overnight visitors is still down from 2019, according to the latest tabulations from the San Diego Tourism Authority.

“Nobody is making their budgets right now, and any increase in cost has an impact on pricing,” said Gleason, who also is chairman of the San Diego County Lodging Association. “It will just make travel more expensive, which puts San Diego at a competitive disadvantage to other destinations and especially for large-market convention business.

“We’re not just competing against L.A. and San Francisco, which may be subject to similar ordinances. We’re also competing against places like Las Vegas and Orlando. The minimum wage is 100 percent more than it was a decade ago, and to raise it another 50 percent is unsustainable.”

Minimum wage sector by sector

The move to lift the hourly wages of those working in San Diego’s service industry is being led by a coalition of three unions — Unite Here; the janitors’ union, SEIU-United Service Workers West; and the stagehands’ union, IATSE 122 (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees).

Their combined effort comes as organized labor has scored some significant wins in recent years, most notably in California, where fast-food employees are now paid a minimum of $20 an hour and health care workers will see their hourly pay rise over time to $25.

While California’s overall minimum wage of $16 an hour is near the top in the nation, the effort to significantly increase such wages has increasingly become a sector-by-sector campaign.

A couple of months ago, voters in Long Beach approved a measure that increased hotel workers’ wages to $23 an hour starting this year, with more annual increases to follow, culminating in an hourly wage of $29.50 by 2028. And the city of Los Angeles is weighing an ordinance that would raise the minimum wage of workers at larger hotels and Los Angeles International Airport to $30 an hour by 2028.

There also have been defeats. Anaheim voters last year rejected a measure to boost hotel and event center workers’ pay to $25 an hour, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors briefly considered a proposal to boost the pay of hotel and theme park workers in unincorporated areas, but it was pulled before it got a hearing.

Browning said she had weighed advocating a measure that calls for a raise to $30 an hour but ultimately backed away from it.

“I just don’t think that’s feasible politically,” she said. “When I checked in with key supporters, I think that would have been pushing the limit of what’s possible.”

Browning said she has only just started meeting with City Council staff members but hopes to find a council member to author the draft legislation. The matter potentially could go before elected leaders this summer, with implementation Jan. 1 at the earliest.

Economic impact

If San Diego were to adopt the proposed minimum wage ordinance, it would be following in the footsteps of several other cities that have enacted somewhat similar legislation targeting pay for hospitality industry workers, said Ken Jacobs, co-chairman of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education.

However, he said, there hasn’t been much research on the economic impacts of such legislation.

But in general, he added, as hourly wages rise, there is significantly less voluntary turnover among workers.

“When you raise workers’ pay, they’re more likely to stay on the job, so it’s easier to recruit workers, and that creates some savings to the employer,” Jacobs said. “You could expect some small increase in price, but ... as a tourist destination, most of these higher costs will be paid by people outside of San Diego.”

— La Jolla Light staff contributed to this report. ◆