LAX living wage law blocked by court

Sounds to me like the city council got too cute and tried to finesse the law in a way that didn't satisfy legal requirements.

A judge Friday delivered a stinging rebuke to Los Angeles' labor and political leadership, barring the city from enforcing a ballyhooed new ordinance that would have extended the city's "living wage" protections to workers at hotels near Los Angeles International Airport.

The eight-page order by Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe went far beyond merely blocking a law that had been considered a point of pride for the city's powerful labor interests. As a practical matter, Yaffe dealt a political defeat to the City Council, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the union that championed the law.

The City Council initially passed a living wage law. Hotel interests in the LAX area bitterly opposed paying their workers enough so they could eat, so they collected signatures for a citywide referendum. Then the City Council pulled the law, and replaced it with a "new" one that resulted from a negotiation with business and labor. Apparently that law wasn't new enough:

Instead of scheduling a referendum, the council rescinded the ordinance and, after talks with the business community, replaced it with a new living wage ordinance.

It included incentives for businesses near the airport, as well as some restrictions on extending living wage protection to other parts of the city. But the hotels and some people who had signed the referendum petition went to court to challenge it.

On Friday, the judge ruled that the new ordinance was essentially the same ordinance. In passing the new one, the council had deceitfully dodged the voter referendum and thus violated the constitutional rights of the public, the judge ruled.

"The elected representatives who enacted the new ordinance tried to make it appear different from the old ordinance," Yaffe wrote, "but their purpose was to avoid the effect of the referendum petition, not to respect it."

I would think the best strategy at this point would be to put the law before voters; in fact, I thought so at the time. It's more impactful for a living wage law to pass that way, and the latest polling shows that it would. Obviously the hotels will fight like hell and raise lots of money to oppose it, so it would be better if unions didn't have to break the bank ensuring that their workers are paid decently. But that's more of an election reform issue.

Janitors Shouldn't Be Allowed To Live DECENTLY

Workers at LAX-area hotels just got a break for once in their lives, as the city and business lobbyists came to an agreement to keep their living wage law in place and enable them to make an honest living with benefits while servicing those who benefit the most from our society.

And as if on cue, The LA Times trashes it.

LET'S TEST YOUR knowledge of how Los Angeles works. Here's the problem: Employees of a dozen or so hotels near Los Angeles International Airport want to be paid more. The hotels, however, don't want to pay their workers more.

Yes, that's the only problem. Those whiny louts want to be paid more. How dare they want to eat 3 meals a day!

Normally this would be for the workers and the hotels to work out. But this is L.A., remember. So the City Council, at the behest of organized labor, extended its "living wage" law — which applied to employees of companies with city contracts — to those hotel workers. The bottom line is that they end up getting paid more. But your question is this: Who pays them?

No, my question is, what is wrong with organized labor appealing to city government, in the exact same way that management and corporate America do all the time? Why is it somehow shameless and sneaky for unions, but "synergy" for big business?

If you answered "why, the hotels, of course," you haven't been paying attention. Please take a seat. If you answered "the unions," you have some remedial catch-up to do. But if you answered "the taxpayers," good work. You win. Sorry, though — no prize.

Except the knowledge that people don't have to decide between food and medicine and home heating, if you consider that a prize.

The gist of the quasi-agreement announced on Wednesday is that the City Council rescinded the ill-considered airport hotel wage law it passed last year and declared that it would instead pass a new law requiring, well, pretty much the same thing. Because the old law is rescinded, there will be no referendum to overturn it. The hotels would get an "economic overlay zone," which is city-speak for tax breaks. They would pay their workers more, and, in turn, they would put less into the city coffers to pay for police and fire protection, street maintenance and other standard services.

See, thanks to the hotel workers, you're going to end up on fire!

Meanwhile, businesses everywhere are sent a clear message: If you come to Los Angeles, the mayor and City Council may single you out for special wage requirements. No wonder that as the city's population grows, its job base is shrinking. New L.A. residents are getting on the freeways to go to neighboring communities where the work is.

LA's job base grew last year, it's just that outlying areas grew more rapidly. But please, blame all the city's problems on people who clean toilets in hotels, continue.

The Chamber of Commerce has put the best face on this deal, hopefully (and naively) noting that the City Council is promising to never do anything like this again. But some council members are already making it clear that they won't be bound by any such promise.

The punch line of this fiasco is that the agreement isn't really an agreement. Talks between labor and the LAX-area hotels are "continuing" — which means taxpayers remain in grave danger.

Danger? Danger of individually giving up like 10 bucks a year so somebody can have a normal life? Whatever happened to shared sacrifice? Whatever happened to moral obligations to fight poverty? Whatever happened to compassion?

The way that the LA Times automatically sides with management in any labor dispute, you'd think they were owned by a large corporation. Oh, wait...