Councilmember Kevin McKeown
Leadership includes listening and learning. This website is interactive. Please let me know what YOU think on this issue. Just click to send me an email: workerjustice@mckeown.net.
There's more to respecting Santa Monica's service workers than leaving a generous tip: a true living wage, fair benefits and job security free from fear and harassment.

Denying housekeepers, kitchen workers and janitors the benefits of our tourism economy is unfair, unethical and bad social planning. Fair labor practices are good business for us all.

In 2001, we passed a Living Wage Ordinance that helped both public and private sector employees. It raised minimum hourly pay to $10.50 for about forty large businesses (including the City!) in Santa Monica's coastal tourism zone, and provided workers with compensation to cover health benefits. At the same time, it protected small, local "mom 'n' pop" businesses and those providing entry-level jobs for youth.
Community activists known as Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism (SMART) championed helping workers lift their families out of poverty with a living wage. Some luxury hotels and the Chamber of Commerce opposed it, but their Proposition KK lost 79% to 21%.

On November 5, 2002, living wage opponents deceptively but successfully exploited recession-rattled residents' economic insecurities and narrowly defeated the Living Wage Ordinance in a referendum vote. The next step is unclear.
Many of us were inspired by the hotel workers at the Miramar, who brought the hospitality industry wage issue to our attention with their courageous struggle to retain their union. When locally-based new hotel ownership took over, a mutually beneficial new contract was signed and the union was recognized... but only after years of battling previous management and professional union-busters.

Recently, Loew's Beach Hotel on Ocean Avenue greeted worker organizers and a delegation of city officials and local clergy by hiring the same out-of-town union-busting firm.

Santa Monica can do better. And we will.

Union-busting is disgusting!
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