Toothless Laws Allow the Los Angeles Hotel Strike to Stall

The past few weeks around the Los Angeles hotel strike have been energized. The union representing the workers announced new contracts with three properties, exposed the use of migrant workers as strike-replacement labor and organized a march of thousands of its members through downtown L.A. on Wednesday.

But in one area, almost nothing meaningful appears to be happening: negotiations with the largest group of hotels. And for that, experts say, the nation’s weak labor laws are partly to blame.
 

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“It can be difficult to prove that there has been a failure to bargain in good faith,” said Michelle Kaminski, an associate professor and labor expert at Michigan State University. “And even if there is proof of that, the remedy is to tell the two parties to go back and bargain in good faith. The penalties are weak, and they absolutely do not have any deterrent power.”

Kurt Petersen, co-president of the workers’ union UNITE HERE Local 11, said this week that no new sessions are scheduled with the Coordinated Bargaining Group (CBG), which represents more than 40 of the 60-plus hotels being struck in Los Angeles and the surrounding area. A meeting last week ended quickly, with no progress.

Bargaining sessions have been few and far between during the strike, which will soon cross the four-month mark and involves workers walking out on small numbers of hotels at a time in coordinated, short-term protests. At one point this summer, nine weeks passed without a negotiation meeting.

The union contends that the CBG most recently made a proposal that offered no new money for wages, pensions or health insurance. The CBG said the union is trying to include “non-mandatory” negotiating points related to housing and homeless vouchers that continue to derail the talks. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE Local 11 is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)

“We’re very much aware that, at the table, UNITE HERE Local 11 wants to focus on these issues that we cannot negotiate,” said Pete Hillan, a spokesman for the Hotel Association of Los Angeles, a coalition that represents the negotiating hotels but is not directly involved in bargaining. “The concern that area hotels have is that [the union] is asking them to solve 20 years of failed public policies around housing and the homeless.”

Those may sound like negotiating postures from both sides. But industry analysts say there’s another factor at work, and it’s significant: Negotiators know that they can drag the process out almost indefinitely, attempting to weaken workers’ resolve in the process.

Peter Dreier, founding chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, said that federal labor laws “are 50 years out of date, and they overwhelmingly favor management over labor. Businesses willfully break the law — it’s a small cost of doing business.”

Stalling in contract talks is not a new strategy; management negotiators for decades have taken advantage of toothless federal law to slow-roll labor negotiations. But the tactic gained new prominence this summer when it was revealed to be the Hollywood studios’ plan to break the Writers Guild of America. (The WGA ultimately approved a new deal with significant wage gains and worker protections.)

The main provision of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), created in 1935, is that both sides have to bargain in “good faith,” Kaminski said. But because that term is inherently fuzzy, and because the meaning of good-faith bargaining hasn’t been legally clarified since then, either side in a negotiation can practically refuse to negotiate for weeks at a time, analysts say.

“The penalties under the NLRA — there actually are no penalties, there are remedies — haven’t changed since the law was enacted,” said Harvard University labor expert Sharon Block. “And there have been changes in the law over time that have made those remedies even weaker by interpretations of the law.”

The hotel workers’ negotiations are occurring on multiple levels. The CBG represents 44 of the hotels being struck, while another 17 properties either negotiate separately or as part of a small group.

UNITE HERE Local 11 reached a tentative agreement on a new contract with the Westin Bonaventure in June, and it recently added agreements with the Biltmore, Loews Hollywood and Laguna Cliffs Marriott. Each of the deals awaits final approval by the union’s members. Among other things, the union has sought raises totaling nearly $11 over three years, which it says would give its members a chance to live closer to where they work.

Hillan called those hotels “outliers” and said the union’s request for a 7% tax on hotel guests to fund worker housing, plus support for a ballot measure requiring hotels to open rooms to the homeless, is slowing negotiations on bread-and-butter issues like wages and benefits.

“I think what also gets lost in this is that we’re 18 months removed from a full [pandemic] shutdown,” Hillan added. “You don’t just absorb 18 months of no work or no paychecks.”

Union leaders say that’s part of the reason they are striking for better wages. But in a slow-roll negotiation with no federal mandate to speed up, they may have to continue applying energy — and pressure — to get the results they want.

Copyright 2023 Capital & Main.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece erroneously reported that the union was seeking raises of 11% over three years. The union is seeking raises of $11.