LA Hospitality Workers Get Wage Boost
The $30 an hour minimum wage will take effect ahead of the 2028 Olympics
News and Views
The Los Angeles City Council just voted to raise the minimum wage for airport and hotel workers to $30 per hour by 2028 – the year the summer olympics are coming to the city. We have UNITE HERE Local 11 to thank for the victory. Across the country in New York City, minimum wage is emerging as a key issue in the mayor’s race. Frontrunner Andrew Cuomo just endorsed a plan to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2027 – still below the city’s living wage. Socialist Zohran Mamdani, currently polling in second place and surging, has endorsed a minimum wage of $30 an hour by 2030.
In a hearing on the case brought by the American Federation of Government Employees against Trump after he attempted to strip TSA employees of their collective bargaining rights, the Trump administration defended its potentially illegal attack on the union as a “different management style.” The judge hearing the case is expected to rule within the week.
In These Times has a deep dive on Trump’s “Scott Walker moment” and where federal unions and the labor movement as a whole go from here. “Workers in the FUN and across public sector unions have used the past couple of months and chaos to demonstrate their value to the U.S. public, conducting what I’ve called a massive public education project to show Americans what the federal government actually does,” reporter Sarah Jaffe writes. “The image of Musk with a chainsaw has stuck precisely because it so perfectly captures the indiscriminate destruction that he’s wreaking.”
New York legalized farmworker unions in 2019, and fifteen unions have formed on farms since then. But farm employers have fought the unions tooth-and-nail, arguing in multiple court cases and before the state labor board that people on guest worker visas do not have the right to unionize. That battle is now playing out on an apple orchard in upstate New York, which won one of the first contracts under the law. The boss is refusing to follow the contract, and it’s going to be up to the state labor board – or the United Farm Workers – to enforce it. Workers’ success there will be important for organizing more farms.
Today’s Win
A Virginia Tech student working at a bookstore realized they were being paid below the minimum wage and organized their coworkers to get the money they were owed. They were fired for speaking out, but ultimately took their case to the NLRB – which ruled that the bookstore had broken federal law by firing workers engaged in protected concerted activity. “The judge ordered Bookholders to remove or revise its arbitration agreement, to stop terminating employees who participate in protected activity such as social media groups, and to provide back pay and compensation,” Cardinal News reports.
Today’s Action
The House of Representatives has passed a budget that would bring major cuts to social programs, including Medicaid, and transfer resources from the poor to the wealthy. Now, the Senate is debating the budget. The AFL-CIO wants you to call your Senator and demand no cuts: https://act.aflcio.org/call_campaigns/call-no-cuts-to-medicaid/