Hotel workers are continuing to publicly call for better pay and working conditions, and on Wednesday, they’re taking to the streets of downtown Los Angeles to call out their employers.
Unite Here Local 11, the workers’ union, is assembling employees of 50 hotels at Hill and 6th streets Wednesday morning for a march.
“The march comes after a fruitless negotiation meeting last week in which a group of hotel employers presented hundreds of SoCal workers with a ‘new’ proposal to resolve the months-long labor dispute,” the union said. “Enraging workers, the hotels did not meaningfully improve upon their prior position, offering no new money for wages, pension, or health insurance.”
In addition to demanding a living wage, workers are also hoping to raise awareness about how they claim their employers are filling in gaps created by striking workers: the “exploitation of migrant workers living in Skid Row,” the union said in a news release.
Some of those workers were among the migrants bused from Texas to California by Gov. Greg Abbott, the Los Angeles Times reports.
L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón is investigating the alleged abuse of migrant workers, which includes migrants saying “they were deprived of their legally required meal and rest breaks and were paid in hand-written checks with no explanation of their hourly wage or hours worked,” the union said.
“If there are violations of the law, there will be severe consequences for this,” Gascón said in a Monday news conference, as reported by the Times. “We want to make sure that our community understands there will be no tolerance for the exploitation of refugees.”