Did Los Angeles City Hall Blink by Delaying the Olympic Wage?

When the Los Angeles City Council passed the so-called Olympic wage last year, airport worker Elisa Valencia almost immediately began charting her future.

Once her gradually escalating pay rate reached $30 an hour, at about the time the Los Angeles Olympics arrived in 2028, Valencia figured she’d be able to afford enough living space to bring her three teenage sons up from her native Mexico and reunite as a family. In the process, she would leave behind the single bedroom she has been renting in a house in South Los Angeles.

“It was a huge relief to think about that — to not have to work as much overtime, and give my kids a good life,” Valencia, 35, said through a translator. “Now, that’s gone.”

At the least, that dream has been deferred. In May, the council, acting on what some officials described as an existential threat to the city’s finances brought by a coalition of hotels and airlines, voted to push back the full implementation of the wage to 2030.

That $30 hourly figure is still out there — just further off, as the business coalition wanted. Under the revised plan, wages will still begin rising this summer for many hotel and airport employees. But workers like Valencia say they need to reach the top end of the scale sooner rather than later to even approach earning what it takes to pay for the basics of living in Los Angeles.

Waiting until 2030 rather than 2028 makes the math worse, Valencia said. Her own costs, including rent, food and transportation, will all continue to rise in the meantime.

“They [the councilmembers] took away something they had already passed and agreed upon,” Valencia said. “They let me down. They let a lot of workers down.”

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The story of how and why the timeline for implementation of the Olympic wage became compromised depends upon who’s telling it, but there’s no question that the business community ultimately pulled off a power play to make it happen.

The original wage plan was passed by the City Council and signed into law by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in May 2025, after nearly two years of hard pushing by two unions that represent large numbers of hotel and airport workers, UNITE HERE Local 11 and SEIU-United Service Workers West. (Disclosure: The unions are financial supporters of Capital & Main.)

The plan’s premise was simple: Workers in those industries have long been paid at rates well below the cost of living in the L.A. area, and the wages phased in from 2025 to 2028 — starting at $22.50 an hour and ending at $30 — would get them closer to covering those costs. The nonprofit Living Wage for Us estimates that households within an hour’s commute of Los Angeles need to earn at least $38.61 an hour to afford such basic needs as food, housing, health care, clothing and education.

From the start, though, local and national hotel and business organizations, along with prominent airlines operating at Los Angeles International Airport, loudly opposed the wage plan, saying that most businesses could not absorb the higher labor costs on the original timeline.

“Los Angeles job creators are still facing the cumulative impacts of rising costs, economic volatility and punitive tax structures,” Nella McOsker, president and CEO of the pro-business Central City Association, told Capital & Main.

“When businesses can no longer absorb those pressures, they reduce operations, leave the city or shut down entirely,” said McOsker, whose group was heavily involved in efforts to repeal or delay the wage plan. “We see this happen again and again, and know the original wage proposal would add to this pressure and result in job losses.”

The American Hotel and Lodging Association, United Airlines and Delta Airlines, all of which played significant roles in trying to defeat the Olympic wage, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Once the council ratified the wage last year, the business groups tried to repeal it via voter referendum. The effort failed to gather a sufficient number of valid signatures after fierce pushback from the unions, which alleged that the business groups were misleading voters as to what the referendum would actually do. After that, the business interests took a different path.

With significant funding from the airlines and hotel groups, the coalition gathered enough signatures to qualify a measure for the November ballot that would repeal Los Angeles’ gross receipts tax on many local businesses. That tax is estimated to be worth up to $860 million a year in revenue for the city’s general fund, which pays for police and fire protection, among other things.

The threat to the city’s budget was epic. “Thousands of layoffs would be required” if the measure passed, city administrator Matthew Szabo warned the council in May. But the business coalition dangled a carrot: It would withdraw the ballot measure if the council agreed to slow down the timeline on the raises.

“Everyone knew this was a bluff,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of UNITE HERE. “Everyone knew the effort would fail at the ballot since it polled miserably — everyone except the City Council, which, instead of sending [the business coalition] packing the moment they threatened to shake down the city, ratified their blackmail.”

The council’s decision ultimately came down to how seriously it took the threat of the tax repeal passing if it remained on the ballot, according to some of those who participated in the process. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor had produced a poll that it said showed almost 70% of likely voters opposed the tax repeal, but councilmembers were wary.

“If this thing about the gross tax receipts passes, we don’t have a city,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said during a council session prior to a May 19 vote. “The business community has us by our necks.”

That day, with negotiations among business, labor and city officials producing little in the way of a compromise, the council voted 11-4 to tear up the original timeline and put the wage plan on a delayed schedule. It finalized the decision a week later.

“The business community has taken a page out of the union playbook to play hardball,” Stuart Waldman, president of the pro-business Valley Industry Commerce Association, told the news site LAist in May.

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The unions have complained bitterly about the council’s reversal, to no avail. UNITE HERE and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy delivered a scathing letter to the Los Angeles city attorney on May 11 requesting an investigation into what it called an unethical attempt by the business groups “to coerce city leaders into an improper legislative trade.” (The city has not announced any investigation.)

Petersen noted the more than two years of work by union members to prod the City Council into action in the first place, packing council meetings, protesting outside and fasting at one point to draw attention to their workers’ plights and the goals of the Olympic wage.

“They beat back the industry’s attempt to overturn the law by referendum, but the greed of the hotel owners and the airlines would not relent,” the union leader said. “They knew they couldn’t beat the workers or the voters, so they went after the council. … Our members are furious at the betrayal.”

Martin Schlageter, senior adviser to City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and someone who participated in the multiparty negotiations that preceded the vote to delay the wage plan, said in an interview that the outcome “wasn’t pleasant, and it wasn’t a good one in almost any case. It was just better than what it could have been,” a reference to the possibility of mass city employee layoffs if the tax repeal measure was approved by voters.

In the end, Elisa Valencia, who works for Flying Food Group, was left wondering what exactly happened to her vision for the future. She said she has been putting in serious overtime, sometimes working 13-hour days at the airline food company in order to keep up with the rising cost of living in Los Angeles.

Her wage is going to rise from $22.50 to $25 an hour this summer, a welcome first step toward some relief. But Valencia said knowing that the $30 figure was only two years off had made the thought of logging so many hours tolerable.

Now? “Four years away,” Valencia said. The idea of getting into an apartment large enough for her kids, she added, is once again on the back burner, lost to the larger struggle to keep life going in L.A.

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