Business
With strike behind them, Los Angeles hotels look to move on
On a spring day last year, representatives from dozens of Los Angeles-area hotels gathered for a meeting with the union representing their cleaners, front desk clerks and other workers.
The workers’ contracts with the hotels had expired and leaders from Unite Here Local 11 laid out a stark proposal for new agreements, which included an immediate $5 an hour raise for its members.
It was a nonstarter for the hotel owners and operators — so much so they refused to send their negotiators to the next bargaining session. Weeks of tense negotiations followed and when talks broke down, Unite Here launched a strike thought to be the largest ever to hit the U.S. hotel industry.
The strike’s intermittent work stoppages, which had staff at more than 60 hotels walking off the job, would go on for more than a year. Workers in red shirts sporting drums and horns became a fixture outside of Los Angeles hotels. Picket lines were tumultuous at times and the disruption riled hotel guests, who lashed out at workers.
But now calm has returned. All but a few of the hotels involved in the strike have agreed to new contracts, conceding on the wage increases that had kicked off the strike as well as other demands made by Unite Here. In all, workers are set to receive a total hourly boost of $10 over the course of the four-year contracts.
While the labor unrest roiled a keystone of Southern California’s tourism industry and the new contracts have added to the hotels’ labor costs, hospitality experts said the strike isn’t expected to have a lasting impact on the region’s hotel industry. Hotels have emerged largely unscathed as demand for rooms in the region is healthy and revenue for the hotels climb.
“Right now people have been traveling and I would say hotels are doing well,” said Ed Fuller, a hotel and lodging industry veteran who previously served as Marriott International’s president and now runs an Irvine-based consulting group.
With the strike out of the way, Fuller said the hotel and broader tourism industry should be focused on boosting the number of international tourists back to pre-pandemic levels and “having the commitment that Los Angeles — and Orange County, and San Francisco and the whole state — is selling at all times.”
Upscale hotels in thriving coastal markets, which typically have unionized workforces, are doing relatively well, said Ryan Kawai Sanchez, an associate with real estate firm Matthews.
In particular, occupancy rates at hotels in Los Angeles County averaged more than 70% over the last 12 months, putting the region above the national average of 62.7%, according to data released by the travel industry nonprofit Visit California. The same is true for Orange County.
But not all hotels in the L.A. region are thriving, and location can be a deciding factor. Occupancy rates at the Glendale Hilton, for example, are hovering around 50%, said Travis Gemoets, an attorney at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Mitchell, which represents the property. Glendale, Pasadena and other more out-of-the-way areas don’t offer the same draw as more desirable and conveniently located areas such as downtown L.A. and near Los Angeles International Airport.
“It’s just a different market,” Gemoets said.
It was those differences in performance, Gemoets said, that led the Glendale Hilton’s owners to be reluctant to make a deal with Unite Here, since the increased wages the union was demanding would hit the hotel harder than more prosperous properties. The hotel eventually agreed to the wage increase last month, after other hotels in the area reached tentative agreements.
Workers took to the picket line at the Hilton Pasadena in December.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“We want labor peace and that’s why we agreed,” Gemoets said.
Union leaders have said they try to extract greater concessions from hotels that prolong negotiations. For instance, in its agreement with Hotel Figueroa, announced last week, the union won an extra dollar raise for non-tipped workers, amounting to a total hourly boost of $11 over the course of the contract, as well as an extra $1 per hour contribution to workers’ pensions. In its deal with the Glendale Hilton, the union secured additional hours for culinary workers and higher pay for tipped workers.
Hotels — whether unionized or not — are battling higher labor costs due to ripple effects from fast-food minimum wage legislation and rising insurance premiums, as multiple insurance providers have abandoned the California market, experts said.
Motels and lower-tier hotels, particularly in California’s rural areas or regions generally with less foot traffic than touristy coastal areas, are lagging behind, Sanchez said. Overall, hotels in the state haven’t completely recovered to pre-pandemic occupancy levels, he said.
“We are really only seeing that year-over-year growth in the luxury sector, and that’s largely due to higher-end customers not being as affected by inflationary pressures as the overall population,” Sanchez said.
Still, “hotels are in pretty darn good shape overall,” said Carl Winston, a professor and director of the hospitality and tourism management program at San Diego State.
Hotel businesses can — and do — pass along added costs to customers, by upping their prices, Winston said. Hotel room rates have gone up dramatically, far exceeding inflation, because it’s the “only thing they can grow.”
“If hotels have a cost increase, they can pass it along to the consumer tomorrow,” Winston said. Hotels change their prices every damn day.”
He said the wage increases built into the new labor agreements are far less of an issue for most major hotels than the debt many of them have taken on, primarily from mortgages with unfavorable interest rates, construction loans and commitments to investors.
“There’s a sense of resignation when it comes to organized labor. It’s almost like, ‘OK, we don’t want them, but they aren’t our biggest threat,’” Winston said. “If you go to hotel boardrooms today, they aren’t talking about wages as an existential threat, it’s the cost of debt they are talking about.”
The lodging industry typically evaluates its health based on two main metrics: occupancy rates and average daily rates.
After rising steeply the last few years, hotel prices in the U.S. this year have remained mostly flat compared with the same time last year, according to data released in April by online booking site Hopper. Higher prices allow businesses to draw in more revenue, but also run the risk of driving away customers.
The median nightly rate for hotels in California this year is $206, a 6% decrease in cost compared with last year’s median of $220, according to data from Kayak. In June, the state’s average daily rate was $192.16, down 0.7% year over year, according to Visit California.
An apparent spike in prices for hotel rooms, Airbnb and other short-term options may show up for California visitors in the coming months, due to a new California law aimed at bringing transparency to resort fees, service fees and hidden prices that jack up a consumer’s bill.
Under the law, businesses must include mandatory fees in their initial advertised prices. Lynn Mohrfeld, president and chief executive of the California Hotel and Lodging Assn., said the group supported the legislation in Sacramento because it should bring “a level playing field” between hotels and the vacation rentals.
“If everybody does it the same way, it makes it a better buying experience for the consumer,” she told The Times earlier this year.
Dealing with the hard numbers of pricing and occupancy rates are a welcome return to normal for hotel owners after the upheaval of the strike.
Unite Here deployed a combination of disruptive tactics — noisy picketing in the early morning, surprise work stoppages, marches through hotel lobbies — that helped put pressure on hotels, said union leaders and hotel industry experts in interviews.
“Hotels were like, ‘This is crazy,’” Bill Doak, of Westwood-based real estate investment firm Stockdale Capital Partners, said of Unite Here Local 11’s demands. Doak’s firm owns the Sandbourne, a Santa Monica hotel that reached a tentative agreement with the union last November. “It was the union’s tactic to make sure hotel owners felt the pain,” Doak said.
Hotels put together contingency staffing plans and told guests they expected to be able to serve them largely without interruption. That proved a difficult task at times.
When workers walked out during the busy Fourth of July weekend, people visiting Disneyland, the Anime Expo downtown and the L.A. leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour were greeted outside their hotels by picketing workers banging on drums and blowing vuvuzela horns — of which the union has purchased hundreds.
In online reviews, guests vented frustrations with both hotel management and picketing workers. “If you want to have a peaceful vacation, choose another location,” wrote a tourist who stayed at 1 Hotel West Hollywood in August.
Early on, managers at some hotels realized that the delivery of portable toilets signaled the union’s plans to carry out a work stoppage and protest in front of the property, said Kurt Petersen, Unite Here Local 11 co-president. To confuse them, the union sent toilets to hotels at random.
In January, Unite Here Local 11 organizers took stock of the dozens of hotels that had not yet agreed to new contracts and noticed about 80% were owned by private equity firms or operated by companies owned by such firms.
The union then made more concerted efforts to target companies such as Aimbridge and Blackstone with work stoppages and ramped up efforts to reach out to public pension funds invested in the private equity firms.
“Are those tactics working? Are they getting owners and managers to come to the table? I think the proof is in the results. They are winning right now,” Winston said.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
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