Business
Restaurant workers wanted to unionize at this L.A. hotel. Now the restaurants are closing
Eight days after restaurant workers at a hip downtown hotel filed cards to organize a union, the hotel’s food operator declared it would shutter the dining establishments that employed them, the latest in a string of showdowns and confrontations between workers and employers in L.A. area restaurants.
The case is playing out at the Hotel Figueroa in downtown, home of Sparrow Italia, Cafe Fig, Bar Magnolia, the Cafeteria and La Casita at Driftwood. The historic building has for the last two decades built a following for its Mediterranean-inspired space and stylish dining rooms, but behind closed doors, tension has loomed between the third-party management company behind the restaurants, called Noble 33, and the estimated 100 food and beverage workers who run them.
Discontent between Noble 33 and its employees at Hotel Figueroa started soon after the hospitality group took over food and beverage operations for the hotel in 2021, according to workers and union organizers who spoke with The Times.
Workers said they were forced to take on multiple tasks without more pay as their colleagues left and management failed to back-fill positions.
Some food and beverage workers, many who worked alongside the unionized hospitality workers employed by Hotel Figueroa, started to agitate to also form a union and gain similar rights.
On Dec. 8, food and beverage workers who worked for Noble 33 notified their management that they intended to form a union, and submitted cards to do so.
Six days later, Noble 33 emailed its food workers, announcing that it would permanently shutter the restaurants by mid-February and lay off its food and beverage staff before then, according to a letter sent to employees on Dec. 14.
In response, restaurant and bar workers employed by Noble 33 at Hotel Figueroa filed a complaint in January with federal labor regulators, accusing hotel management of trying to suppress labor organizing among its food and beverage staff.
Unite Here Local 11, which represents the hotel workers at Hotel Figueroa, filed the complaint with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the food workers at Sparrow Italia, Cafe Fig, Bar Magnolia, the Cafeteria and La Casita at Driftwood.
Management company Noble 33 said it would close all the restaurants adjoining the lobby, seen above, at the Hotel Figueroa.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
The closing of the restaurants would leave large wells of unused space on the hotel’s ground floor.
Restaurants and two bars take up most of Hotel Figueroa’s bottom floor. The hotel’s front patio serves as outdoor dining space for Cafe Fig, a popular all-day Mediterranean restaurant featuring dishes like cauliflower bites, tuna tartar tostadas and truffle fries. Hanging vine chandeliers decorate the indoor dining room, which is attached to Bar Magnolia, a well-stocked watering hole for hotel guests and diners who want to sip on a libation.
Walk a few steps toward the the courtyard, past an arched entryway and there’s Sparrow Italia, which serves coastal Italian dishes and cocktails in an indoor-meets-outdoor dining room and bar that opens up to the hotel’s iconic coffin-shaped pool. La Casita at Driftwood offers food and drink service poolside when open for the summer season.
It’s unclear what operations if any would replace the dining spaces at the Hotel Figueroa, a Spanish Colonial hotel at Figueroa and 9th streets in downtown L.A.
“We are still evaluating all options concerning future food and beverage offerings at Hotel Figueroa,” a spokeswoman said Monday in a prepared statement.
Some of the workers said they were devastated by the move, which came right before the Christmas holiday.
Leobardo Perez, a 45-year-old dishwasher at Cafe Fig, said he decided to organize after two other dishwashers left and management made him take on their work instead of hiring new dishwashers. Perez, who has worked at the restaurant for two years, said he was also forced to do other jobs, such as prep or pastry work without additional pay.
“All we want is for our rights to be respected in the workplace,” Perez said. “It’s unjust for them to close down the restaurants because we just want to organize.”
The towering building of Hotel Figueroa. A spokeswoman for the hotel said that the notice to terminate food staff did not come from hotel management or ownership.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
Third-party manager disputes hotel’s claim
A spokesperson for Noble 33 said the third-party vendor had no option but to close.
Noble 33 contends that its contract with Hotel Figueroa stipulates that the unionization of food and beverage employees would trigger a kill clause between both parties. “It would be a breach of the hotel’s current unionization agreement with the union,” a Noble 33 spokesperson said in a written statement.
Hotel Figueroa and Unite Here Local 11 deny this claim.
A spokeswoman with Hotel Figueroa said notice to terminate the food staff “was not prompted by hotel management nor hotel ownership.”
She said the layoffs were initiated by Noble 33, which issued the notices without first discussing it with hotel ownership, management or employees.
“It is also important to note that our agreement specifically stipulates that Noble 33 will never be requested or authorized to engage in unfair labor practices,” Hotel Figueroa said in a written statement.
Unite Here Local 11 called Noble 33’s claim “absurd.”
“It is absolutely disgusting that a company would sign a contract promising to kill its operations simply because its employees exercise their federal right to organize a union,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11.
Food workers across the region have been struggling with owners and employers in an industry shaken last year by brutal financial realities and allegations of mismanagement and abuse. At least 65 notable closures of restaurants affected the dining scene in 2023.
The closures continued into the new year. On Jan 1, Sweet Lady Jane — famous for its triple berry cake — announced it had shuttered all six of its Los Angeles locations.
At the same time, discontent between food and beverage workers and employers continues to grow.
In June, former servers at Jon & Vinny’s, a hip Italian American restaurant, filed a class-action lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against the restaurants’ owners, Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo. The lawsuit against Joint Venture Restaurant Group Inc., which owns Jon & Vinny’s, claimed that the company denied servers tips, resulting in a reduction of take-home pay due to diner confusion regarding an 18% service fee.
In September, hostesses at Nobu in Malibu filed separate lawsuits against the popular restaurant, alleging sexual assault, sexual harassment and discrimination.
In December, the National Labor Relations Board announced that it was looking to force Starbucks to immediately reopen 23 stores that workers allege were shut two years ago in a move that was allegedly done to suppress union organizing. Six of those locations were closed in the Los Angeles area.
Edith Reyes, a line cook at Cafe Fig, said she felt compelled to organize because of what she described as unfair treatment on the part of managers.
Reyes, a single mom who has worked at the restaurant for about three years, said managers ignored multiple requests for a few weekends off to spend with her daughters.
At the same time, she said newer workers were granted weekends off.
“It’s unfair. I’m the only parent my daughters have,” she said of her teenage daughters. “They depend on me. I need to be there for them and I need to provide for them.”
She was given a few hours short of full-time and didn’t qualify for vacation or sick time off, she said.
On Jan. 20, Hotel Figueroa hotel workers took to the picket line for a few days for the first time this year. The move was the latest in a series of intermittent strikes and a larger summer strike that launched in July when hundreds of hospitality workers at hotels across Southern California took to the streets in protest.
Unite Here Local 11 represents the hospitality workers and reached tentative agreements with about two dozen hotels, out of some 60 properties in Los Angeles and Orange counties initially targeted by strikes that started last summer.
The Supreme Court on Friday grappled over a law that could determine the fate of TikTok, an enormously popular social media platform that has about 170 million users.
Congress enacted the law out of concern that the app, whose owner is based in China, is susceptible to the influence of the Chinese government and posed a national risk. The measure would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it by Jan. 19.
Here are some key takeaways:
The court appeared likely to uphold the law.
While the justices across the ideological spectrum asked tough questions of both sides, the overall tone and thrust appeared to suggest greater skepticism toward the arguments by lawyers for TikTok and its users that the First Amendment barred Congress from enacting the law.
The questioning opened with two conservative members of the court, Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., suggesting that it was not TikTok, an American company, but its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, that was directly affected by the law.
Another conservative, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, focused on the risk that the Chinese government could use information TikTok is gathering on tens of millions of American teenagers and twentysomethings to eventually “develop spies, turn people, blackmail people” when they grow older and go to work for national security agencies or the military.
Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, asked why TikTok could not just create or buy another algorithm rather than using ByteDance’s.
And another liberal, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said she believed the law was less about speech than about association. She suggested that barring TikTok from associating with a Chinese company was akin to barring Americans from associating with foreign terrorist groups for national security reasons. (The Supreme Court has upheld that as constitutional.)
Still, several justices were skeptical about a major part of the government’s justification for the law: the risk that China might “covertly” make TikTok manipulate the content shown to Americans or collect user data to achieve its geopolitical aims.
Both Justice Kagan and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, stressed that everybody now knows that China is behind TikTok. They appeared interested in whether the government’s interest in preventing “covert” leveraging of the platform by a foreign adversary could be achieved in a less heavy-handed manner, like appending a label warning users of that risk.
Lawyers for TikTok and for its users argued that the law is unconstitutional.
Two lawyers argued that the law violates the First Amendment: Noel Francisco, representing both TikTok and ByteDance, and Jeffrey Fisher, representing TikTok users. Both suggested that concerns about potential manipulation by the Chinese government of the information American users see on the platform were insufficient to justify the law.
Mr. Francisco contended that the government in a free country “has no valid interest in preventing foreign propaganda” and cannot constitutionally try to keep Americans from being “persuaded by Chinese misinformation.” That is targeting the content of speech, which the First Amendment does not permit, he said.
Mr. Fisher asserted that fears that China might use its control over the platform to promote posts sowing doubts about democracy or pushing pro-China and anti-American views were a weaker justification for interfering in free speech than concerns about foreign terrorism.
“The government just doesn’t get to say ‘national security’ and the case is over,” Mr. Fisher said, adding, “It’s not enough to say ‘national security’ — you have to say ‘what is the real harm?’”
The Biden administration defended Congress’s right to enact the law.
The solicitor general, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, argued that Congress had lawful authority to enact the statute and that it did not violate the First Amendment. She said it was important to recognize that the law leaves speech on TikTok unrestricted once the platform is freed from foreign control.
“All of the same speech that’s happening on TikTok could happen post-divestiture,” she said. “The act doesn’t regulate that at all. So it’s not saying you can’t have pro-China speech, you can’t have anti-American speech. It’s not regulating the algorithm.”
She added: “TikTok, if it were able to do so, could use precisely the same algorithm to display the same content by the same users. All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of a foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.”
The court appears unlikely to wait for Trump.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to issue an injunction delaying the law from taking effect until after he assumes office on Jan. 20.
Mr. Trump once shared the view that Chinese control of TikTok was an intolerable national security risk, but reversed course around the time he met with a billionaire Republican donor with a stake in its parent company.
If the court does uphold the law, TikTok would effectively be banned in the United States on Jan. 19, Mr. Francisco said. He reiterated a request that the court temporarily pause the law from taking effect to push back that deadline, saying it would “simply buy everybody a little breathing space.” It might be a “different world” for TikTok after Jan. 20, he added.
But there was scant focus by the justices on that idea, suggesting that they did not take it seriously. Mr. Trump’s brief requesting that the court punt the issue past the end of President Biden’s term so he could handle it — signed by his pick to be the next solicitor general, D. John Sauer — was long on rhetoric extolling Mr. Trump, but short on substance.
Business
'We will not be closing.' Amid the fires, employers and employees walk a fine line between work and safety
When Brigitte Tran arrived Wednesday morning at the Rodeo Drive boutique where she works as a sales associate, she was on edge.
Smoke from multiple wildfires raging across Los Angeles County billowed overhead. The luxury shopping corridor usually bustling with tourists appeared a ghost town.
Tran’s co-worker texted their boss to let her know neighboring stores had closed, and described the acrid smoke in the air. But the woman, at home in Orange County, did not seem to grasp their concerns. “We will not be closing unless the mall instructs us to close,” she replied.
Tran, who, fearing professional repercussions, asked that her place of work not be named, grew more anxious as the hours ticked by. Around 3 p.m., she and the two other employees working that day mutinied. They packed up, told the security guard to head home, and locked the doors a few hours before closing time.
As the wildfires have raged across Los Angeles County, choking the air, closing schools and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate, employers and employees alike have had to manage a difficult balancing act between work and well being. Some employers responded swiftly to the crisis, shutting down offices and shifting to remote work, providing outdoor workers with masks and other protective equipment, and offering support for employees forced to evacuate. Others have been less adept, clumsy in their communications or wholly unmoved by worker concerns — sparking anger among their ranks as a result.
The fires have underscored the need for companies to have a clear plan in place to respond to emergencies, said Jonathan Porter, a meteorologist at private weather forecaster AccuWeather. The obligation, he said, goes beyond monitoring whether an office is in an evacuation zone. For example, as the current devastation unfolds, businesses should be aware of the “copious amounts of dangerous smoke that’s wafting into the air” and be prepared to provide outdoor workers with quality respirators or move them away from polluted air.
Some employers gave employees flexibility. Snap, the Santa Monica-based creator of the photo messaging app Snapchat, for example, kept its offices open on Wednesday but encouraged employees to work remotely, said a company spokesperson.
Others changed course after fielding criticism.
An announcement by UCLA that the campus would remain open for classes and regular operations on Wednesday drew anger from some instructors and students on social media.
Victor Narro, project director for the UCLA Labor Center and a lecturer on campus, said in a post on X he would ignore UCLA’s mandate and hold an optional class online.
“Students have been up all night panicked about sleeping through evacuation orders, winds still high, branches falling all over Westwood, power outages across city, & our new chancellor (on his 2nd day) thought this should be his first bold call…” wrote Nour Joudah, an assistant professor in UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, in another X post.
That evening, UCLA changed course as conditions worsened, announcing it would close campus.
On Saturday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk released a statement saying classes would be held remotely for at least another week and campus operations would be curtailed. “We ask for continued flexibility and understanding as we all work through these difficult times,” Frenk wrote.
But for many workers, the chaos of the last few dayshas left them feeling like they are fending for themselves.
Tim Hernandez, a driver with Amazon Flex, an on-demand Uber-like program in which people use their own cars to deliver packages, was assigned a route Tuesday along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, which was rife with closures.
When he questioned whether making the delivery was safe, he said dispatchers at a Amazon facility in Camarillo brushed him off, leaving him to choose between concerns for his safety and worries that his rating in the Flex app would be hurt if he refused to go. He decided to try to make the deliveries, battling gusts of wind that knocked him over at one point. He lost cell signal, however, and was forced to return to the warehouse without completing the vast majority.
And when he arrived for his shift Tuesday, Alfred Muñoz, 43, an Amazon delivery driver who works out of a warehouse in the City of Industry, said he was handed an N95 mask but given little other instruction.
“It was just kind of business as usual,” Muñoz said.
High package counts and the number of stops on his assigned routes this week have made work even more difficult. On Tuesday, with wind gusts whipping debris around making it difficult to see, he had about 180 stops and 290 packages to deliver. On Thursday, the air thick with smoke and ash, he had more than 300 packages.
He woke up Thursday morning with a bloody nose and a sooty black crust in the corners of his eyes.
In response to a request for comment, Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said the company was “closely monitoring the wildfires across Southern California and adjusting our operations to keep our employees and those delivering for us safe.”
“If a driver arrives at a delivery location and the conditions are not safe to make a delivery, they are not expected to do so and the driver’s performance will not be impacted,” she said.
At the Brentwood location of popular Italian eatery Jon & Vinny’s, staff complained of headaches and sore throats in a text message group chat. An employee, who asked not to be named fearing retaliation at work, said that on Tuesday, staff huddled around an iPad with a fire map pulled up to keep an eye on the expanding evacuation zone. From the front of the restaurant, they could see the glow of the Palisades fire.
The employee said they were frustrated management kept the restaurant open when the perimeter of the mandatory evacuation zone was just two blocks away. On Wednesday, every server scheduled to work called in to say they were not coming, the employee said.
A spokesperson for Joint Venture Restaurant Group, which owns Jon & Vinny’s, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During natural disasters and extreme weather, employers’ choices can sometimes mean life or death, said David Michaels, a professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health and a former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
He pointed to recent floods from Hurricane Helene that killed several workers at a plastics manufacturer. The tragedy has drawn scrutiny from state investigators, and a wrongful death lawsuit accuses the company of requiring employees to stay on site amid flooding after they requested permission to leave.
“It’s incumbent on employers to ensure the safety of their workers,” Michaels said. “The safety of their employees must take precedence over business concerns.”
Yasha Timenovich, 48, a driver for rideshare app Lyft and food delivery platform DoorDash, is more worried about declining earnings than on-the-job safety. With many restaurants and other businesses closed and would-be customers fleeing the city, he said that rides and deliveries have been slow. Traffic patterns have been strange and unpredictable with families piling into vehicles to flee fires.
Timenovich, who faced an order to evacuate his Hollywood apartment with his fiance and 6-year-old daughter Wednesday night, said he planned to stay with relatives for a few days in San Luis Obispo, where he hopes business will be better.
“I’m going to get out of here because it’s too crazy with these fires,” Timenovich said.
Scott Bessent, the billionaire hedge fund manager whom President-elect Donald J. Trump picked to be his Treasury secretary, plans to divest from dozens of funds, trusts and investments in preparation to become the nation’s top economic policymaker.
Those plans were released on Saturday along with the publication of an ethics agreement and financial disclosures that Mr. Bessent submitted ahead of his Senate confirmation hearing next Thursday.
The documents show the extent of the wealth of Mr. Bessent, whose assets and investments appear to be worth in excess of $700 million. Mr. Bessent was formerly the top investor for the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros and has been a major Republican donor and adviser to Mr. Trump.
If confirmed as Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent, 62, will steer Mr. Trump’s economic agenda of cutting taxes, rolling back regulations and imposing tariffs as he seeks to renegotiate trade deals. He will also play a central role in the Trump administration’s expected embrace of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
Although Mr. Trump won the election by appealing to working-class voters who have been dogged by high prices, he has turned to wealthy Wall Street investors such as Mr. Bessent and Howard Lutnick, a billionaire banker whom he tapped to be commerce secretary, to lead his economic team. Linda McMahon, another billionaire, has been picked as education secretary, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is leading an unofficial agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
In a letter to the Treasury Department’s ethics office, Mr. Bessent outlined the steps he would take to “avoid any actual or apparent conflict of interest in the event that I am confirmed for the position of secretary of the Department of Treasury.”
Mr. Bessent said he would shutter Key Square Capital Management, the investment firm that he founded, and resign from his Bessent-Freeman Family Foundation and from Rockefeller University, where he has been chairman of the investment committee.
The financial disclosure form, which provides ranges for the value of his assets, reveals that Mr. Bessent owns as much as $25 million of farmland in North Dakota, which earns an income from soybean and corn production. He also owns a property in the Bahamas that is worth as much as $25 million. Last November, Mr. Bessent put his historic pink mansion in Charleston, S.C., on the market for $22.5 million.
Mr. Bessent is selling several investments that could pose potential conflicts of interest including a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund; an account that trades the renminbi, China’s currency; and his stake in All Seasons, a conservative publisher. He also has a margin loan, or line of credit, with Goldman Sachs of more than $50 million.
As an investor, Mr. Bessent has long wagered on the rising strength of the dollar and has betted against, or “shorted,” the renminbi, according to a person familiar with Mr. Bessent’s strategy who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his portfolio. Mr. Bessent gained notoriety in the 1990s by betting against the British pound and earning his firm, Soros Fund Management, $1 billion. He also made a high-profile bet against the Japanese yen.
Mr. Bessent, who will be overseeing the U.S. Treasury market, holds over $100 million in Treasury bills.
Cabinet officials are required to divest certain holdings and investments to avoid the potential for conflicts of interest. Although this can be an onerous process, it has some potential tax benefits.
The tax code contains a provision that allows securities to be sold and the capital gains tax on such sales deferred if the full proceeds are used to buy Treasury securities and certain money-market funds. The tax continues to be deferred until the securities or money-market funds are sold.
Even while adhering to the ethics guidelines, questions about conflicts of interest can still emerge.
Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary during his first term, Steven Mnuchin, divested from his Hollywood film production company after joining the administration. However, as he was negotiating a trade deal in 2018 with China — an important market for the U.S. film industry — ethics watchdogs raised questions about whether Mr. Mnuchin had conflicts because he had sold his interest in the company to his wife.
Mr. Bessent was chosen for the Treasury after an internal tussle among Mr. Trump’s aides over the job. Mr. Lutnick, Mr. Trump’s transition team co-chair and the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, made a late pitch to secure the Treasury secretary role for himself before Mr. Trump picked him to be Commerce secretary.
During that fight, which spilled into view, critics of Mr. Bessent circulated documents disparaging his performance as a hedge fund manager.
Mr. Bessent’s most recent hedge fund, Key Square Capital, launched to much fanfare in 2016, garnering $4.5 billion in investor money, including $2 billion from Mr. Soros, but manages much less now. A fund he ran in the early 2000s had a similarly unremarkable performance.
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