UNITE HERE is a national union which represents hospitalities workers, such as hotel housekeepers.
They are making a push in Los Angeles to have the city pass a law that would require hotels to report how many vacancies they have each day. Then they would be required to allow homeless people to occupy those rooms. The hotel would be compensated at the market rate. The move is to help alleviate the housing crisis that LA is facing. The union members would benefit by not having to worry about getting their hours cut because they would be needed to clean the rooms every day and the hotels would benefit by having full occupancy, which would in turn help them recover from the loss during the COVID pandemic.
Sounds like a situation where everyone wins. The city addresses the homeless problem. The homeless have a roof over their head. The hotel staff have steady work to do. And the hotels have full occupancy.
However, the hotel owners are not happy about the idea. They've complained that they can't charge over market rate. And the hotels can save hundreds of millions of dollars by not having a full force of workers, since they don't have all those rooms to clean. And they figure, if business does pick up, they can always call the workers back for a few days.
But instead of coming out and saying that, the hotel industry has chosen to be openly bigoted and go all doom and gloom if their regular type of guests have to stay in a room next to those scary homeless people. Naturally, Fox is helping Chip Rogers, the President and CEO of American Hotels & Lodging Association, spread this hateful propaganda:
It is hard to imagine a better way to put hotel workers in danger and destroy LA’s tourism industry. In 2020, nearly 25% of Los Angeles County’s adult homeless population had "severe mental illnesses," while 27% had a "long-term substance use disorder," according to Stanford University.
These statistics explain why hotel job losses will be catastrophic if Unite Here succeeds in turning all LA hotels into homeless shelters. Who will want to work or stay at an LA hotel when doing so comes with enormous safety risks?
It should be noted that is about the same percentage of people in the entire population with mental health issues.
Rogers and company also say that they know that this program would be a failure because they tried to do that before. Again, Rogers pantaloons are ablaze since he himself admitted that while there were some problems, it worked out OK and helped a lot of hotels stay afloat during the pandemic.
Finally, he says that the workers will be put at risk by having all those homeless people in the hotel. Again, it is the workers who are pushing for it.
All of Rogers' complaints come down to the same thing as many other company CEOs - they're afraid that the unions will win and that might cut into their profit margin by a few hundred thousand dollars. Then they might have to skip a year or two of buying another yacht, poor babies.
