Things to do |

San Diego labor unions calling on city to mandate $25 minimum wage for service workers

upLabor unions representing thousands of hotel, janitorial and convention workers are calling on the San Diego City Council to boost the pay of lower-paid service employees to $25 an hour — a 50 percent increase over the current citywide minimum wage.

Union members are planning a mile-long march Wednesday afternoon to City Hall to highlight their call to action — a proposed wage ordinance that would cover a broad swath of employers, from hotels and the San Diego Convention Center to Petco Park, Pechanga Arena and tech companies like Qualcomm.

While the largest focus of the San Diego Service Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance is the city’s hotel workers, the legislation’s language encompasses janitor and security personnel at biotech and technology companies, as well as those employed at “event centers,” which can include concert halls, stadiums, sports arenas and convention centers.

More specifically, the draft ordinance defines event center employees as those working in food preparation, ushering, ticket-taking, concessions and in parking structures. Union leader Brigette Browning estimates that the number of hotel workers affected is roughly 8,000. Their hourly pay, she said, currently ranges from $16.85 — San Diego’s minimum wage — to $28.

The number of janitorial workers who could potentially benefit from the proposed wage hike is around 5,000 — just at tech and biotech companies in the city of San Diego, estimates Christian Ramirez, policy director for the local SEIU-United Service Workers West union. Janitors in San Diego, he said, typically earn between minimum wage and $18.25 an hour.

“Frankly, they’re making decisions about whether they’re buying food or paying rent,” said Browning, president of the hotel workers union, Unite Here Local 30, and head of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council. “Where we represent the most workers — in downtown and in Coronado — our dishwashers and room attendants are going to be at $24 an hour this year, so I think we’ve done a very good job at lifting our members up. But if we’re surrounded by hotels that are paying significantly less, it’s putting downward pressure on what we’re able to get going forward.”

Raising minimum wage sector by sector

The move to lift the hourly wages of those working in San Diego’s service industry is being led by a coalition of three unions — Unite Here; the janitors’ union, SEIU-USWW; and the stagehands’ union, IATSE 122 (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees).

Their combined effort comes at a time when organized labor has scored some significant wins in recent years, most notably in California, where fast food employees are now paid $20 an hour and health care workers will see their hourly pay rise over time to $25. While California’s minimum wage of $16 an hour is near the top in the nation, the effort to significantly increase the wages of the lowest paid workers has increasingly become a sector-by-sector campaign.

Just a couple months ago, voters in Long Beach approved a measure that increased hotel workers’ wages to $23 an hour, starting this year, with more annual increases to follow, culminating in an hourly wage of $29.50 by 2028. And the city of Los Angeles is weighing an ordinance that would raise the minimum wages of workers at larger hotels and Los Angeles International Airport to $30 an hour by 2028.

There also have been defeats. Anaheim voters last year rejected a measure to boost hotel and event center workers’ pay to $25 an hour, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors briefly toyed with a proposal to boost the pay of hotel and theme park workers in the unincorporated areas of the county, but it was pulled before it ever got a hearing.

Browning said she had weighed advocating for a measure that calls for a raise to $30 an hour, but ultimately backed away from that.

” I just don’t think that’s feasible, politically,” she said.”My preference would have been to go for $30, but when I checked in with key supporters, I think that would have been pushing the limit of what’s possible.”

Browning says she has only just started meeting with City Council offices but hopes to find a council member to author the draft legislation. The matter could potentially go before elected leaders this summer, with implementation, at the earliest, Jan. 1.

Similar measures have, predictably, received pushback from the hotel industry, and it’s likely that San Diego will be no different. Hotelier Robert Gleason, who chairs the San Diego County Lodging Association, says it’s unfair to single out a particular industry for higher hourly wages, especially at a time when the tourism industry hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic.

Although visitor spending has easily eclipsed figures recorded before the pandemic, the number of hotel rooms booked and the volume of overnight visitors is still down from 2019, according to the latest tabulations from the San Diego Tourism Authority.

“Nobody is making their budgets right now, and any increase in cost has an impact on pricing,” said Gleason, who is president and CEO of San Diego-based Evans Hotels. “It will just make travel more expensive, which puts San Diego at a competitive disadvantage to other destinations and especially for large-market convention business.

“We’re not just competing against L.A. and San Francisco, which may be subject to similar ordinances. We’re also competing against places like Las Vegas and Orlando. The minimum wage is 100 percent more than it was a decade ago, and to raise it another 50 percent is unsustainable.”

At the San Diego Convention Center, the union-backed wage measure would affect about 225 SEIU-represented employees,including those working in cleaning services, event setup and grounds maintenance, spokesperson Maren Doughterty said. She said current hourly wages for those workers averages $22.48. New hires start at $19.57 an hour. The measure would also affect workers in the stagehands union who are not directly employed by the convention center, she added.

“Just getting by”

Christian Carbajal, a father of two young children, has been employed at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront hotel for the past 15 years, working most recently as an attendant at the hotel’s grab-and-go market where he earns $22.95 an hour. He shares a three-bedroom rental home in the Nestor area with his wife; two kids, ages 3 and 7; and his brother-in-law. The rent is $3,000 a month. That, together with other necessary expenses, doesn’t leave much leeway for vacations and meals out, he said.

His wife earns $22.50 an hour as a barista at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, just down the road from the Hilton. He said the two of them are still digging out of debt they incurred during the pandemic when hotels were largely shut down and they were out of work.

“My wife works in the morning, and I work at night because there can be no child care because it’s so expensive,” said Carbajal, 41. “Any outside child care doesn’t exist in my house. At the end of the month, we’re saving very little and it’s just getting by. There’s no wiggle room for a trip or emergency savings.”

He acknowledges that he and his wife are fortunate because they’re a two-income household, but even so, a dollar-an-hour raise for each of them would be especially helpful financially, he said.

“A lot of people have two and maybe three jobs,” Carbajal added. “That’s why we say, one job should be enough. People have to pool their money together to live. America’s finest city became America’s most expensive city.”

If San Diego were to adopt the proposed minimum wage ordinance, it would be following in the footsteps of a number of other cities that have enacted somewhat similar legislation targeting pay for hospitality industry workers, said Ken Jacobs, co-chair of UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. To date, though, there hasn’t been much research, he said, on the economic impacts of such legislation.

However, as hourly wages rise for workers in general, there is significantly less turnover, research has shown.

“It’s important to remember, when you raise workers’ pay, they’re more likely to stay on the job, so it’s easier to recruit workers, and that creates some savings to the employer,” Jacobs said. “You could expect some small increase in price but you’re unlikely to have a major effect on the hotel industry. As a tourist destination, most of these higher costs will be paid by people outside of San Diego. Minimum wage laws don’t reduce the number of jobs but they may reduce the number of job vacancies.”