Topline:
Thousands of unionized hotel workers walked off the job earlier this week. Marking the second wave of hotel strikes. Workers from 60 area hotels are demanding an immediate $5 an hour raise with raises totaling $11 over three years.
Why it matters: UCLA's Labor Center Director Kent Wong calls the hotel strike one of the largest among hotel workers in history.
Why now: Wong says hotel workers took a huge hit during the pandemic. There were massive layoffs and unemployment.
A second wave of thousands of unionized hotel workers walked off the job earlier this week. Workers from 60 hotels in L.A. and Orange counties are demanding:
On Monday of this week, walkouts affected hotels near LAX. That came after a three-day strike that targeted hotels in downtown L.A, Hollywood, Santa Monica and Orange County during the Fourth of July week.
LAist recently spoke with Kent Wong, who directs UCLA’s Labor Center. The center aims to unite workers, students, faculty and policymakers to “address the most critical issues facing working people today.”
This conversation with Julia Paskin for LAist 89.3's All Things Considered show has been condensed for clarity:
Can you recap some of the underlying drivers of the strike?
Kent Wong: This is a very significant strike. One of the largest among hotel workers in history. Over 15,000 workers are impacted in a mainstay of the Southern California economy. Southern California relies heavily on tourism and on the hotel industry. The disruption in the height of tourism season is very challenging.
And so during the pandemic, hotel workers took a huge hit. There was massive layoffs, unemployment and now that the industry is rebounding and now that workers are heavily engaged on the job, there is a demand to increase wages and benefits within this very profitable industry.”
Staffing levels were seriously reduced during the pandemic because people were not traveling. But now travel has rebounded. Have staffing levels come back to equal that demand?
Representatives from a group representing hotels in bargaining say the hotels are prepared to operate "as long as the disruption lasts."
In statement issued at the start of the strike they also said: "We also remain available to meet with the union whenever its leaders decide to make themselves available to resume negotiations.”
They've also pushed back on the issue of housing affordability calling it a universal issue that really is up to the city leaders to resolve.
Kent Wong: Staffing levels unfortunately, have not come back to equal the demand. And so as a consequence, many of the hotel workers are working harder than ever. They're cleaning more rooms, they're servicing more customers and clients than in the past. And so this has been a source of displeasure among the hotel workers who have seen essentially a speed up on the job, but have not seen an increase in their salaries.
So we're dealing with more than 60 hotels that had contracts expire at the end of June, but the hotels are not all walking out at once and staying out. Instead, Unite Here Local 11 is doing these rolling strikes. Can you help explain this strategy instead of just walking out and staying out?
Kent Wong: The whole point of a strike is to withhold the labor of the workforce in order to cause disruption. That's what a strike is about — to show that workers are critical to this industry and to withhold labor means that it makes the employers scramble to try to find ways to keep their businesses open. By having a rolling strike, it really keeps the employers off guard because if they know in advance that they're going to have to try to recruit strikebreakers, then they will do so. If they don't know in advance, then, it makes the challenge of hiring strikebreakers that much more difficult.
This is one of those cases where the union is bargaining with a group that represents dozens of hotel owners. How does that affect negotiations as opposed to just bargaining with one owner?
Kent Wong: In many ways, it maximizes the strength of the hotel workers because you don't have a situation where you're going one at a time with individual employers. Interestingly, one of the major employers, the Westin Bonaventure has settled. So that actually provides a window of hope into the future to see if other hotels might be able to match the offer of the Westin Bonaventure. But by having an industry-wide strike, it maximizes the collective pressure of the hotel workers to demand changes industry-wide.
What do you expect to happen from here? Do you have any idea how long the strike will continue on for?
Kent Wong: This is the height of tourism season. The Southern California economy is heavily reliant on tourism, one of the largest industries in Southern California. And this is a time when the hotel workers have shown tremendous resolve, tremendous internal unity, and I do think that the pressure is now on the hotel employers to respond.
Topline:
The high cost of housing means more people are being priced out of not only owning a home but also renting alone. The share of adults 65 and over looking to rent with a roommate has tripled in the past decade, according to the listings site SpareRoom.
The background: Baby boomers have been aging as housing costs across the U.S. have spiked. In 2023, more than a third of households headed by adults 65 and over struggled to pay housing costs, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, and the share is even bigger for women living alone.
Why it matters: SpareRoom finds that roommates in general are skewing older. Young people are living with their parents longer, unable to afford moving out or simply trying to save up. Meanwhile, more people in their 50s, 60s and older are unable to make it on their own.
Read on ... for more on this growing trend.
David West raised four kids in Los Angeles working as a Hollywood cinematographer — no mean feat in such a pricey city. But a few years ago, his life took a hard turn.
"Everything went south. Divorce. My brother died," he said. "My dog died."
On top of that, a string of clients who'd hired him for decades also passed away.
Before long, he'd burned through cash and damaged his credit. He moved to Fresno, and now, at 72, West is in a situation he never imagined at this stage of life but one that more and more older people are facing: renting a room in the home of a complete stranger.
"I tried to move, like, an apartment's worth of stuff into a room," he said with a laugh at how impossible it seemed. "You know, how do you do that? I still haven't figured it out."
West looked into a housing subsidy, but his income is just over the limit, so he's grateful for the cost savings of a house share. His roommate, also an older man, covers Wi-Fi, utilities and cable. West volunteers his photography skills at the church where the man is involved and shares his Costco membership.
"It's that give-and-take thing," he said. "It's trying to help each other out as much as possible."
The high cost of housing means more people are being priced out of not only owning a home but also renting alone. The share of adults 65 and over looking to rent with a roommate has tripled in the past decade, according to the listings site SpareRoom.
"They're not the biggest group of roommates, but they're by far the fastest growing," said the site's communications director, Matt Hutchinson.
SpareRoom finds that roommates in general are skewing older. Young people are living with their parents longer, unable to afford moving out or simply trying to save up. Meanwhile, more people in their 50s, 60s and older are unable to make it on their own.
"Maybe 10 years ago they'd have looked at a one-bed or a studio and thought, 'Well, I'll rent that,'" Hutchinson said. Now "they're looking at prices and going, 'There's no way I could afford that.'"
Baby boomers have been aging as housing costs across the U.S. have spiked. In 2023, more than a third of households headed by adults 65 and over struggled to pay housing costs, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, and the share is even bigger for women living alone.
"Older adults are more likely to be housing-cost burdened than working-age adults, and that gets more severe with age," said Jennifer Molinsky, who researches aging and housing at the center. "It's climbed up the income scale. So more and more, you know, middle-income people are struggling with housing costs than ever before."
Older adults are also more likely to face major life events that can lead to financial strain. Caezilia Loibl, chair of the Consumer Sciences Program at Ohio State University, has researched the financial toll of chronic disease and the loss of a spouse at an older age.
"The shock is enormous," she said, "and we see it very clearly in our data how the debt burden goes up and financial vulnerability goes up." People were more likely to fall behind in debt payments, for example, see their credit score drop, file for bankruptcy and face foreclosure.
Saving money may be the top reason that more older people are house-sharing. But some see other benefits.
"Oh, I think it's wonderful. Maybe more of the way people used to live," said Darla Desautel, who's 74 and has rented with roommates for years, though she's currently house-sitting in Minnesota.
She loves the flexibility of not being tied down and being able to move where she wants, and she thinks not living alone is healthier. She got along especially well with one roommate who also was an older woman.
"We had a lot in common, and that's pretty special when that works out," she said.
To be sure, there can be annoyances. One place was kept too cold in winter and too hot in summer. There can be smelly cat litter boxes or a roommate who talks on speakerphone in a common area. "Noise is huge. A lot of people think they're quiet when they're really not," she said.
If she could afford it, Desautel said, she would rent solo, though "with a short-term lease." But that would eat up more than half her income. In addition to receiving Social Security, she still works occasionally as a leadership consultant and coach, and she is a licensed secondhand dealer selling "other people's junk."
Desautel is proud that she has learned to whittle down possessions and live with less. "Right now I can move across country with 10 boxes shipped USPS and take a plane," she said.
For now, that's her plan, driving this time, to continue her house-sitting gig in Arizona for the summer. And when that ends, she'll find her next roommate.
Topline:
Chinatown has no laundromats, leaving many working-class residents without a basic service. A mobile laundry truck, paid for by the local council district, is offering free washes twice a week as a temporary solution.
Why it matters: Without laundromat options, some residents are forced to wash clothes by hand or spend time and money traveling outside the neighborhood.
Why now: Council member Eunisses Hernandez is using $250,000 in district funds for a year-long contract with LA Laundry Truck. She said constituents and neighborhood advocates have long told her about the need for greater laundry access for residents.
The backstory: Newer housing developments are bringing in higher-income residents with amenities like in-unit laundry. Meanwhile, advocates say, many older buildings don't have laundry rooms or have aging machines often in disrepair.
What's next: Hernandez say the mobile service will serve as a stopgap until a more permanent solution is found, like a community-run laundromat.
In Los Angeles, the soundtrack is familiar. Car horns, the whine of leaf blowers.
But in the middle of Chinatown, another sound cuts through the din: the rhythmic hum of washers and dryers from a trailer parked outside the Alpine Recreation Center.
Chinatown hasn’t had a laundromat for as long as anyone around can remember. This mobile setup – run by the nonprofit The Laundry Truck LA – has become the neighborhood’s de facto laundromat, offering the service for free to locals, twice a week.
For 70-year-old Sam Ma, it’s been a relief.
Ma, a retired construction worker, picked up freshly-laundered items — two pairs of pants, a hat, and some socks, bundled in a white garbage bag for the bus ride home.
He usually washes his clothes by hand. But about two weeks ago, he was hit by a car. Bruises and cuts cover his hands, making it difficult to scrub heavier items.
“The things I can wash, I wash,” he said in Mandarin. “But these are too thick. It’s too hard.”
Nearby, Laundry Truck employee Rebel Fox checked him out with a clipboard after handing him his load.
“We help a lot of seniors out here,” Fox said. “And we offer folding services, too. It really helps people who don’t have the dexterity in their hands.”
The Laundry Truck started out in 2019 providing laundry services to people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles and has expanded to high-need communities, like Eaton Fire survivors.
In February, the nonprofit started operating in Chinatown under a year-long contract with Council District 1, showing up every Wednesday and Thursday at 9 a.m.
Chinatown advocates say the lack of a laundromat is especially hard on low-income tenants living in older, neglected buildings.
“These landlords aren’t doing much to keep it updated,” said Sissy Trinh, executive director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance.
Maintaining laundry rooms may require major plumbing upgrades and hookups that many landlords avoid.
Advocates say in buildings that do have shared coin-operated machines, they may be broken or in constant use. Many residents decide to launder clothes by hand — in sinks or bathtubs.
“In one building, the sinks were so small, people had to cut their sheets in half just to wash them,” Trinh said. “They’d wash one half, then the other.”
Those who could benefit from a laundromat include seniors on fixed incomes, and workers living paycheck to paycheck, including garment workers and home health aides.
“You’re talking about low-income, financially-stressed households,” Paul Ong said.
Ong, who studies urban inequality at UCLA, says Chinatown reflects a broader pattern: as neighborhoods change, basic services can disappear.
The neighborhood’s last full-service grocery store closed in 2019 after the property was sold to a developer. Meanwhile, new market-rate housing has gone up, catering to higher-income residents with amenities like parking and in-unit laundry.
“The irony is that historically, laundry was bread and butter for the Chinese community,” Ong said.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants built livelihoods around laundry work — one of the few industries open to them at the time.
Nowadays, laundry options have become hard to come by.
Residents without access to machines have to leave the neighborhood entirely to find a laundromat in Lincoln Heights or Echo Park, which has seen its own laundromats disappear.
“The long-term, permanent solution is that a laundry service opens up,” in the neighborhood, said Council member Eunisses Hernandez, who represents Chinatown.
Hernandez says constituents have asked for a laundromat from the time she was knocking on doors as a City Council candidate.
Hernandez, who is up for re-election this year, says the neighborhood could benefit from a community-run laundromat offering affordable services.
“If private industry is not making that investment in Chinatown then perhaps it’s up to the city – and the people of that neighborhood – to build something for them,” she said.
In the meantime, Hernandez has directed about $250,000 from her district — using TFAR payments from developers building larger projects — to cover a year of mobile laundry services.
The contract with the Laundry Truck runs through next February.
After that?
“We’ll keep filling the gap until we get to a permanent solution,” Hernandez said.
Could that solution be combined with housing?
Some community advisors to a new affordable housing project being developed on the northwestern edge of Chinatown have been pushing for a self-service laundry that would be open to other neighborhood residents, says Eugene Moy who sits on the advisory board of New High Village.
But any fix will take time. That project, Moy said, could be two years out from even breaking ground.
Back at the truck, the machines continue to spin. By mid-afternoon, nearly 18 loads of laundry are done.
Two months in, there are kinks to work out. How to get more residents to take advantage of the unit's capacity? Its machines can churn out 40 loads per shift.
There is also the question of whether some seniors are physically able to transport their laundry even a few blocks.
But the service is starting to get regulars. One woman on her second visit stood by the trailer, cradling just-washed clothes in her arms while clutching her daughter's teddy bear, now a sparkling white.
"If it keeps going, I'll keep coming," said the woman who gave her last name as Mo. "It's very convenient."
Her apartment building doesn’t have a laundry room. Sometimes she asks a friend next door if she can use theirs. With three children, the cost adds up quickly.
Thinking aloud, she calculated how much she saved that day.
About $8, she estimated — money she said could now spend on her kids.
Topline:
The Los Angeles River isn’t just for walking and biking, you can join other Angelenos and dance in the middle of it.
Why: Local club the Gratitude Group has been helping Angelenos unplug and connect with one another by throwing dry dance parties in unexpected places around L.A.
What's next: The next L.A. River dance party is happening tomorrow, Sunday. Read on to learn more.
There’s a fair amount of recreational activities Angelenos can do in and around the Los Angeles River like biking, walking, even kayaking, but did you know you can also dance in the dry river bed of a Los Angeles icon?
Dancing in the sun
Adam Weiss is the founder of the Gratitude Group, a club that hosts various events across Los Angeles like dance parties at the River, a screen-free reading club at the Central Library and meditative sound baths at Elysian Park. That’s just this weekend alone.
Weiss has been hosting the free dance parties for about two years now. The locations vary. Previously he’s held them at the Elysian Park helipad.
“Everybody wants to dance, they're just waiting to be invited to dance, and then if you're a good DJ, you just keep the floor packed,” said Weiss, who also deejays these events. Lately it's been a lot of disco, funk and soul. Weiss also likes to keep the gatherings dry, meaning no drugs or alcohol. He thinks it makes people engage with each other more.
“So the focus really is on connection and dancing,” Weiss said.
Ariana Valencia lives in Burbank and attended last month's dance party, also at the L.A. River. She says dancing in the middle of the concrete riverbed made the city feel like a playground that she could explore.
“I’d never been to the L.A. River prior to that. You think it’s just a little swampy little pond, but it was actually really full,” said Valencia. “I would have never thought that was in the middle of the city.”
Weiss says part of the appeal is not just getting people outside but to get them to experience Los Angeles differently.
At the last event, people walking or biking along the river path joined on a whim — some even brought their kids. Weiss says that’s exactly the kind of reaction he hopes for.
“ I want it to be family friendly. I want it to feel welcoming. I want it to be inclusive,” Weiss said. “My main thing is I just want people to actually dance. I think it feels good to dance.”
For Valencia that inclusiveness is part of the draw. She says she’ll be joining again this Sunday.
“Even though it wasn’t advertised as a dry event I think the fact that it was a family friendly kind of thing was appealing to me,” said Valencia.
After the last dance party went viral, Weiss says more than 1,500 people have RSVP-ed for tomorrow's event. This compelled him to close reservations.
Weiss plans to hold the event every other week this Spring and Summer — taking place either at the River or the Elysian Field Helipad with its amazing view of the city.
Weiss wants to start branching out too, and is eyeing the Culver City Stairs as a possible location.
“ I just wanna bring people to cool interesting places to dance,” Weiss said.
Topline:
Artist Paul Botello painted five Chavez murals in this Pomona park decades ago. Now, with allegations of sexual assault agains the labor leader, he, along with the city's mayor, is assessing what changes should be made to honor the movement's activism while reflecting the icon's tarnished reputation.
Why it matters: Communities across Southern California and the country are grappling with how to remove the images and name of Cesar Chavez from public places while upholding the legacy of this civil rights movement.
Why now: Southern California has a large concentration of murals, plaques, street names, and statues of Cesar Chavez. The dialogue in Pomona which is happening between an artist, a city elected official, and an ethnic studies scholar signals a more nuanced approach to the reevaluation of Chavez’s legacy.
The backstory: Pomona’s Cesar Chavez Park was the result of activism by neighborhood leaders who wanted to create a safe space for families amid escalating gang warfare between Black and Latino youth in the early 2000s
What's next: Pomona’s mayor plans to bring up changes to the Cesar Chavez murals at Monday’s City Council meeting.
Go deeper: Cesar Chavez’s legacy now looms dark in LA.
At Cesar Chavez Park in Pomona, a mural depicts the now-disgraced farm worker leader from the waist-up, in a serene, almost Buddha-like pose. To his left, a lady justice figure holds the scales of justice and on the right, there are images of farm workers toiling in a field. Chavez looks like a saint.
“And that's what people thought he was,” said Pomona Mayor Tim Sandoval as he stood in front of the mural.
But after several women stepped forward accusing the late labor icon of sexual assault, that view has radically changed. Now there are calls to remove his image from public spaces, widely impacting Southern California, which has a large concentration of murals, plaques, street names, and statues dedicated to him.
But do the entire murals have to be removed, or can there be a more nuanced approach to the re-evaluation of Chavez’s legacy — a re-evaluation that doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?
This week, the artist Paul Botello, Pomona Mayor Sandoval, and Pitzer College Emeritus Professor José Calderón, a former activist who was involved in getting the murals painted, met up at the park, in the shadow of the busy 57 freeway, to discuss how to go forward.
In the early 2000s violence between Black and Latino gang members gripped Pomona.
“When a young Latino was killed, we actually did a march all the way from City Hall to what is now this park,” said Calderón.
Calderon helped organize that march. He said activists were inspired by something Chavez liked to say, that when you get angry, don’t take it out on others — organize.
So they lobbied for the park, which was filled with trash and syringes, to be cleaned up and made family friendly. And because they used his quote, it was named Cesar Chavez Park.
Muralist Paul Botello was chosen to create five murals at the park that depicted Chavez from youth, through his service in the U.S. Navy during World War Two, to key moments during his farm worker activism.
Today, while he feels betrayed by Chavez, he’s also keen to preserve parts of the murals which tell the bigger story of the exploitation of farm workers and the fight to improve their conditions.
While California state law says an artist must be consulted if there are any proposed changes to a mural, the ultimate decision will be made by Pomona City Council.
Sandoval said he has not received calls or emails at City Hall. But people in his various social and civic circles have told him, he says, that Chavez’s images should be removed.
Botello had brought mock-ups of the alterations he’d like to make to each mural. For the mural which depicts Chavez in a Buddha-like pose, for example, he wants to replace his face with the face of a farmworker wearing a hat.
He also wants to keep much of another mural, which depicts Chavez as a teenager in a suit surrounded by boys and girls sitting on rows of tilled soil. His one change is to turn the image of Chavez into a Zoot Suiter, a rebellious Mexican American youth from the mid 20th century.
“ 95 percent is going to be there because it just represents all the youth who also toil in the field to help their parents,” he said.
Calderon agrees with these more targeted changes. He fears painting over the murals entirely would erase the neighborhood activism that led to the creation of this park.
The right and the white supremacists are already using it to say, ‘see this is what we told you about Cesar being anti-immigrant, but now they're going a little bit further and they want to wipe out ethnic studies.
He’s also concerned their removal would give fuel to people who oppose Latino activism and the growing movement in public education to require the teaching of Latino history.
“The right and the white supremacists are already using it to say, ‘see this is what we told you about Cesar being anti-immigrant’”, he said. “But now they're going a little bit further and they want to wipe out ethnic studies”.
While Botello wants to keep the mural of Chavez serving in the U.S. Navy, because he believes it's important to show that Latinos have contributed to this country's military, he’s keen to make a change in the fifth mural.
It depicts a young man and woman above the phrase “Sí se puede,” the famous farmworker slogan, “yes, we can.”
The young man is clearly Chavez. Botello says he wants to replace it with the face of Dolores Huerta, the woman who led the United Farm Workers with Chavez and has accused Chavez of rape.
Mayor Sandoval says he plans to bring up Botello’s proposals at the next city council meeting.
