A phased-in minimum wage hike in Los Angeles that will mandate a $30 an hour wage for hotel employees in 2028 is already impacting the hotel industry and negatively affecting the very workers it is meant to help.
That’s the conclusion of a new report by the Hotel Association of Los Angeles (HALA) of the measure passed by the L.A. city council and signed into law by Mayor Karen Bass last spring.
“The bottom line is the city of Los Angeles has forced a wage and benefits package on hotels that is utterly unaffordable at a time when Californians and Americans are laser focused on affordability,” HALA President Dr. Jackie Filla told Fox News Digital in an interview this week.
The law already mandated a pay increase to $22.50 per hour in July of last year. It’s set to go to a $25 base wage this July, with a $7.65 health benefit add-on, the total $32.65 package representing a 45 percent increase in one year.
The study found hotels have eliminated or expect to eliminate six percent of their positions, or about 650 jobs, since the Hotel Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance went into effect last September.
The measure is sometimes called the “Olympic Wage” in reference to the summer games to be held in Los Angeles in 2028, when it will raise pay for hotel and LAX airport workers to $30 per hour.
Filla says she is urging the mayor and council to amend the ordinance to ease the burden on the city’s hospitality industry.
Filla said:
We are at the very beginning of the series of these increases and hundreds of hotel workers have already lost their jobs. Even more are seeing their hours reduced. We’ve seen restaurant closures within hotels, parking is already getting more expensive, and improvements and the creation of new buildings altogether are being delayed or canceled. So taken together, these impacts should really sound alarm bells for our local policymakers.
The HALA president said the wage expenditures have reduced training programs that enabled blue-collar workers like cooks and dishwashers to advance to higher-paid positions, noting that many managers in the industry got their start that way.
The study also found:
• A significant number of the jobs lost have been labor-intensive positions like food and beverage, housekeeping, and parking.
• Nearly two-thirds of hotels expect staff hours to decrease in 2026, with three-quarters anticipating reductions of at least 10%.
• Two-thirds of subcontractors operating on hotel properties plan to raise prices to offset wage increases, and one in five plan to cancel hotel contracts altogether.
“Unlike typical layoffs that are occurring in other industries right now, these job losses, and it is 6% of jobs lost in a short period of time, were entirely policy-driven, caused by the mayor and city council,” Filla said. “And what is especially troubling about this is it didn’t have to happen.”
She added, ”Hotels actually want to maintain and grow their workforce heading into these major events, but these dramatic cost increases just make that impossible.”
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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