Welcome to Soviet Los Angeles, where the government controls everything in the name of “the workers,” but “the workers” never seem to benefit from it.
The latest chapter in the revolution is the city’s announcement Monday that a referendum challenging an ordinance mandating a $30-per-hour minimum wage for hotel and airport concession workers has failed.
Proponents of the referendum needed 92,998 valid signatures of registered voters residing in the city of Los Angeles. They turned in a total of 140,774 signatures. It wasn’t enough.
According to the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters, which conducted the signature verification, 6,898 signers wrote an address different than the one where they are registered to vote. The county “canceled” the registrations of 1,933 signers. Another 2,339 were duplicate signatures, 18,054 signers were not registered to vote, 4,342 did not live in the city of L.A., 2,913 signatures didn’t match the county’s records, 211 signers printed their signatures, and various other errors or omissions occurred.
In addition, 17,082 signatures were withdrawn, meaning these petition signers also signed a form to remove their signatures from the referendum petition.
Oddly, the city reports that there were 117,607 “signature withdrawal requests.” How does it happen that more than 100,000 people who did not even sign the petition would sign forms to withdraw their names from it?
The answer can be found in an August 21 letter from attorney Jason D. Kaune of the law firm Nielsen Merksamer to L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman. Kaune asked Hochman to “open an investigation regarding whether paid operatives and others associated with coordinated efforts to oppose a referendum in the City of Los Angeles have committed pervasive fraud and illegal conduct.”
The committee backing the referendum seeking to overturn the minimum-wage law was the LA Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress, largely funded by the airline and hotel industries. Kaune wrote that the committee hired “a professional circulation firm, GOCO Partners, to obtain signatures on the Referendum petition” to qualify the measure for a citywide election.
Signature collection took place between May 30 and June 27. At the same time, supporters of the minimum-wage law formed a committee to oppose the referendum. That committee, called Citizens in Support of the LA Olympic Wage, was largely funded by UNITE HERE Local 11 and Service Employees International Union – United Service Workers West, the unions representing hotel and airport workers.
Their opposition took the form of a campaign urging voters to withdraw their signatures. One example cited by Kaune was a text message campaign that read, “Hi, [voter’s name]! Today is the day to revoke your signature!” The message was accompanied by a cartoon of a ringing alarm clock and the caption, “TIME’S RUNNING OUT TO REVOKE YOUR SIGNATURE. DON’T WAIT, SEND YOUR FORM TODAY!”
Citing campaign finance filings, Kaune wrote that the labor unions’ committee paid “least $1 million to On the Ground, Inc., a professional signature gathering firm.” UNITE HERE Local 11 also helped with “campaign worker salaries” and posted a phone number on its website for voters to call “if Referendum circulators were observed.”
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“We won this, and it’s not fair that these companies are now just trying to take it,” a union worker at Flying Food Group told the publication Hotel Dive back in July.
That worker and others may be surprised to find that they “won” layoffs, as often happens when the government mandates higher wages without mandating the magical appearance of money to pay those wages.
Perhaps they can secure a room in the new homeless housing that Mayor Karen Bass will celebrate after she buys up distressed hotel properties.
Write [email protected] and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley
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