A hospitality union submitted two new citywide initiative proposals Tuesday aimed at addressing “excessive CEO-to-worker pay ratios,” one week after the same group initiated efforts to expand a $30-an-hour minimum wage to more workers in Los Angeles.
Unite Here Local 11 — which represents more than 32,000 workers employed in hotels, restaurants, airports and other industries throughout Southern California and Arizona — filed the two initiatives Tuesday with the Los Angeles City Clerk.
According to the union, the first initiative would impose a 0.5% tax on gross receipts in the city for large companies that pay their CEOs or other executive employees more than 100 times their L.A. median employees’ wage. The tax rate would be higher for companies that pay their executives even more.
The second initiative would require voter approval for certain contracts that grant companies the right to use the city’s real property. It would also apply to companies that pay their CEOs more than 100 times their median L.A.-based employees.
According to Unite Here Local 11, the tax is intended to incentivize companies to fairly pay their workers. It would also generate revenue for housing and street repairs from large businesses that “adopt pay practices that can exacerbate inequality.”
A study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that between 1978 and 2023, executive compensation nationwide increased by 1,085% while average worker pay rose only 24%, according to the union.
“If large corporations are contributing to inequality, such as by paying their CEOs extreme amounts of money while at the same time failing to pay workers a living wage, I believe that it’s only right that those companies should pay more in taxes for the things the city needs,” Maria Torres, a dishwasher at Flying Food Group who has helped lead efforts to raise worker wages, said in a statement
“If big companies that are contributing to inequality want to profit by using the public’s property, voters should get some say,” she added.
Last week, the union filed paperwork to boost the citywide minimum wage to $25 an hour, gradually increasing to $30 an hour by July 1, 2028. Another initiative would require voter approval for hotel and event center development projects that receive subsidies from the city, such as tax rebates or below-market prices for city-owned land.
It would also apply to major hotel developments — involving 80 or more guest rooms, or even center developments adding more than 50,000 square feet or 1,000 square seats — and require that the City Council find such projects compatible with nearby communities.
The initiatives were filed in response to a referendum aimed at rescinding a city-approved law to provide hotel and airport workers with a $30 an hour minimum wage by 2028.
A coalition of airlines, hotels and concession companies at Los Angeles International Airport known as the Los Angeles Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress launched a petition two days after Mayor Karen Bass signed the ordinance into law.
The group has until June 30 to gather nearly 93,000 signatures from registered voters in Los Angeles to qualify the measure for the June 2026 ballot.
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In response, the union launched a campaign known as “Defend The Wage LA,” to inform the public of what they described as “misleading signature-gathering efforts” to overturn the Olympic Wage.
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