Thousands of hotel workers in Southern California are on the verge of going on strike if a deal is not reached by midnight on Friday, upending the region’s tourism industry.

In a city where hotels have played a central role in the fight against homelessness, Unite Here Local 11’s impending strike may also pose new challenges for Mayor Karen Bass and her effort to get people off the streets.

A strike would disrupt operations at the LA Grand, the downtown hotel that has provided about 480 rooms to the city’s displaced population since the outbreak of COVID-19.

In recent months, the 13-story hotel has been key to the mayor’s Inside Safe initiative, which aims to dismantle homeless camps and move people inside. The hotel is by far the largest facility used by Inside Safe and takes in disengaged residents from downtown, Echo Park, the Fairfax

i.e

strict and other areas.

At the same time, the LA Grand is one of 62 Southern California hotels whose contracts expire on Friday, and it appears to be the only hotel on the list that currently offers housing for the homeless.

Asked about the fate of the LA Grand, Bass said Wednesday she and her team are already in contact with the union, which represents 41 employees of the LA Grand and has up to 15,000 workers in LA and Orange County preparing for a strike. .

“We’re actually in talks with Unite Here,” she said. “We have a great relationship with them and I think we will solve the case.”

The city pays $154 per night per room at the LA Grand, an amount that not only covers the rooms, but also

also the

food and household services. Unite Here Local 11 represents the cooks, dishwashers and housekeepers who clean rooms and provide three meals a day for the hotel’s guests. Those workers are employed by the hotel,

other

not the city.

“We have an extremely vulnerable population that relies on us for food and livelihoods,” said Kevin Murray, president and

general manager ceo

of the Weingart Center Assn., the non-profit organization that provides case management services to the LA Grand.

Murray said his nonprofit respects the union and

its members

need for a living wage. But the customers need to be fed, he said.

Murray said he hoped the union would also understand the LA Grand’s unique situation and not interfere with their ability to bring in food.

Owned by a Chinese real estate company, the LA Grand has operated as temporary housing for the homeless since 2021, when it was leased by the city as part of the Project Roomkey program. When that program ended, Bass extended the city’s lease on the hotel for another year, keeping it open until January 1.

uari

31, 2024.

Unite Here Local 11 co-

P

resident Kurt Petersen said that while the union believed in and supported Project Roomkey, “a program designed to help the unhoused defeats its purpose when the workers who hire the staff are paid wages so low that they are at risk to become homeless.”

He argued that the hotel’s employees had been fighting for months for a living wage, a fair workload and a safe working environment, while being ignored by the hotel. The upcoming strike and

resulting therefrom

the disruption it will cause to the program “could easily have been avoided if employee needs had been considered,” Petersen said.

Shen Zhen New World I, the Chinese

property

company that owns the LA Grand said in a written statement it had tried to negotiate with the union by offering similar agreements it had made with workers at another hotel

that she owns

But

was ultimately rejected.

They hoped that the workers at the LA Grand would not make life more difficult for the unhoused people staying at the hotel.

“If the union pursues a work stoppage at the LA Grand Hotel, we have contingency plans in place to continue serving the homeless residents,” the statement said.

The company did not disclose those plans or comment further.

The idea of ​​bringing in contingent workers, which some hotels might consider, is much more politically charged at LA Grand.

Los Angeles is generally a staunchly unionist city, and the organized labor movement is deeply entrenched in the city’s political power structure. Unite Here, in particular, has a huge influence on Los Angeles City Hall, with

put sent

hundreds of thousands of dollars

in

to several candidates last year. Politicians and non-profit organizations, even if they don’t have direct control any action the hotel takes would hate bringing in employees who are considered “scabs”.

Politicians and non-profits would hate to bring in employees who are deemed “scabbers” even if they are a layer away from any action the hotel takes.

More than 350 previously unhoused people living at the Grand Hotel, the majority of whom are from Skid Row, will be affected by this potential strike, Bass spokesman Zach Seidl said. The mayor is urging all parties to come together and find a solution that protects vulnerable residents during a homelessness crisis, Seidl said.

Hotel workers say work at LA Grand has been difficult since it became a homeless shelter, with different challenges than tourist work.

Anna Pineda

, a longtime cleaner at the LA Grand, said some of the building’s unhoused residents have been yelling at housekeepers that they didn’t want them to enter their rooms. Workers at the hotel are also frequently exposed to disease and bodily fluids, she said.

“We came into a room and the beds were stained with feces, urine sometimes both or blood,” she said, adding, “We tried to let the nurses know because you weren’t sure if they were sick or not.”

Security guards, nurses and others in the hotel

LA grand

have reported a number of incidents over the past two years, some violent, others involving property destruction, according to emails obtained by The Times through a request for public records.

Last summer, a Salvation Army employee, who oversaw operations at the hotel at the time, reported that a resident had smashed furniture in his room and barricaded himself inside, to which police responded. Weeks later another

resident hotel

threatened a guard with a gun. Months after that, a

hotel

resident threatened to “knock out” a guard for asking for his room number,” according to correspondence obtained by The Times.

Despite the difficulties, Pineda said she and other Local 11 members were proud of the work they were able to do at LA Grand.

“They’re people, after all. We’re people, too. … We wanted them to come back to enjoy a clean room, enjoy the smell of a clean room,” Pineda said.

Since the hotel now accommodates long-term residents, cleaning has been reduced to twice a week. It is unclear what will happen if the union goes on strike.

“It’s one of those between a rock and a hard place that’s hard on the workers and hard on the city,” said Madeline Janis, co-executive director of Jobs to Move America and former director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. a politically influential labor-affiliated non-profit organization.

Janis, who worked briefly at Local 11 early in her career and expressed her deep support for union workers, described the potential strike as a “mystery” for the city.

are

crossing a picket line if temporary workers were appointed by the hotel management.