Hotel and airport workers today urged Los Angeles voters not to sign a petition which aims to overturn a recently approved minimum-wage increase that will provide them with $30 per hour by 2028.
Members of the Tourism Workers Rising Coalition, which lobbied for the minimum wage increase, hosted a news conference Tuesday morning on the south lawn of City Hall alongside City Council members Hugo Soto-Martinez and Ysabel Jurado, as well as with Yvonne Wheeler, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor to begin a campaign, known as “Defend The Wage LA.”
Workers also encouraged residents to report any petition gatherers online or at 909-362-0042.
The coalition is made up of organizations including the Unite Here Local 11 and Services Employees International United-United Service Workers West unions and Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which describes itself as “an organizing and advocacy institution committed to economic, environmental and racial justice.”
“I didn’t fight for over two years for this wage because I want to buy another yacht like the CEO’s backing the phony petition,” Maria Torres, a dishwasher who works for Flying Food Group, an airline catering company that prepares meals for international flights out of Los Angeles International Airport.
Torres said the wage increase will help keep a roof over her head, and to provide for her family in Honduras.
Backers of the referendum effort say the ordinance will raise labor costs and could force some businesses to lay off employees or shut down as the tourism industry faces challenges.
The recent City Council-passed ordinance will raise the minimum wage for airport hotel workers to $22.50 an hour starting in July, followed by annual $2.50 increases over three years. Workers would receive $25 an hour beginning in July 2026, $27.50 an hour in July 2027 and $30 an hour in July 2028, in time for the Olympics, as well as receive a new $8.35 per hour health care payment, which will begin in July 2026.
“Rather than paying workers what they deserve, the industry which has already spent over 1 million dollars to stop their workers from earning a livable wage, is expected to spend millions more on this referendum,” according to a statement from Unite Here Local 11, the union representing 32,000 hospitality workers in Southern California and Arizona.
The union argued that in the two years since the ordinance was introduced, the CEOs of Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Hilton and Marriott reached over $330 million in compensation. The petition has received major funding from Delta and United, as well as the American Hotel & Lodging Association, an industry grade group.
The union previously led efforts to increase the minimum wage for tourism workers in nearby cities. The minimum wage for hotel workers in Santa Monica was increased in 2016, in West Hollywood in 2021, in Glendale in 2022 and in Long Beach in 2024.
“The airlines and hotels would rather spend millions to overturn the living wage than give workers a dime now,” said David Huerta, president of SEIU-USWW. “These are billion-dollar companies fighting to make sure that working families in L.A. don’t get a raise. Don’t be complicit. Don’t sign the CEO’s petition.”
Meanwhile, the L.A. City Clerk’s Office announced on Friday that it certified the referendum effort launched by a coalition of airlines, hotels and concession companies at Los Angeles International Airport known as the Los Angeles Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress. The petition was filed two days after Mayor Karen Bass signed the ordinance into law and four days after the City Council gave its final approval.
The group has until June 30 to gather about 93,000 signatures from registered voters in Los Angeles to qualify the measure for the June 2026 ballot.
Phil Singer, a spokesman for the coalition, told the Los Angeles Times the wage increase “threatens revenue Los Angeles urgently needs.”
“Small businesses will be forced to shut down, workers will lose their jobs, and the economic fallout will stretch across the city,” Singer told The Times. “We’re fighting for all of it: the city’s future, the jobs that sustain our communities, and the millions of guests the tourism industry proudly serves year after year.”
