What LA's tourism unions just did

"I am so overwhelmed with joy right now because I never thought I'd see this today," said Jovan Houston, a customer service agent at LAX, as she stood at a podium in front of City Hall on Tuesday morning. She paused and took a deep breath, growing visibly emotional. Behind her, the crowd wearing red and purple shirts began to cheer. "Take your time, girl," someone yelled.

It was understandable why Houston needed a minute. When I first interviewed her in May 2024, she and her fellow union members at SEIU-United Service Workers West had already been making weekly visits to the council chambers for over a year, urging legislators to pass the city's Olympic wage ordinance that guaranteed tourism workers like her a minimum wage of $30/hour by 2028. The ordinance finally became law in May 2025 and the first wage increase, to $22.50/hour, was set to start on July 1. That is, until the culmination of all their organizing was nearly undone when a referendum to reverse the ordinance was filed by hotels and airlines — including LA28 founding sponsor Delta.

But on Monday, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder announced that the referendum had failed to qualify for the ballot, and Houston joined dozens of her fellow union members at City Hall to celebrate the news that the ordinance would finally — finally! — be going into effect.

"You know those red notices that you get in the mail when you don't pay your bills?" Houston asked. "Well, airlines, guess what? You got a red notice." The crowd behind her roared. "It's time to pay these workers what they deserve," she said. "Pay up now!"

Even before the Olympic wage was passed, hotels and airlines were angling to undermine the deal. Hilton threatened to take a planned hotel to another city in LA County. Another group of hotels claimed they'd have to exit their Olympics room block deals, arguing in a letter to LA28 that paying workers a living wage would require them to exercise the force majeure clause in their contract. Some of those hotels, it should be noted, currently benefit from generous tax incentives that were given to them by the city precisely because of the role they would play in upcoming megaevents; Marriott's convention center-adjacent Moxy was provided city-owned land and receives a share of its room tax revenue, estimated to total $103.3 million over 25 years.

And then, two days after LA Mayor Karen Bass signed the Olympic wage into law, the direct challenge to the Olympic wage was filed on May 29. The newly formed LA Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress, which was primarily funded by Delta, United, and the powerful American Hotel & Lodging Association, ended up spending over $2.5 million attempting to land the referendum on the June 2026 ballot. But just filing the referendum paperwork directly hurt workers, too: because the ordinance was now being challenged, those same hotels and airlines would not have to honor the pay increases for their employees meant to go into effect on July 1.

Angelenos are constantly besieged by petitioners trying to gather signatures for ballot measures as they go about their daily lives. These signature gatherers are often paid gig workers who lack any political context, and there's always the potential for what could generously be labeled a broad interpretation of the issues. But this felt like one of the most willfully misleading referendum attempts I have ever seen. For the entire month of June, my DMs lit up with reports from all over the city — they really loved ruining stone fruit season at the farmers markets, apparently — that petitioners were just making shit up. Here are some of the interactions documented by Unite Here Local 11, which submitted an official complaint to city, county, and state officials:

If you want to get a measure on the city's ballot, you need to gather a certain number of registered LA city voter signatures, a number that's based on how many people voted in the last election. To qualify for the next election, this effort needed 92,998 signatures. After signatures are turned in, they're verified by the county registrar, a process that in, this case, took about two months. As you can see from the report below, even though 140,774 signatures were turned in, only 84,007 were deemed valid. This happens a lot — people sign petitions who don't actually live in the city of LA or aren't registered to vote here — so it's not altogether that shocking that this effort came up short.

But that number only tells half the story.

Within a week of the referendum going live, the tourism unions stood up an entire counter-campaign, Defend the Wage, to combat the misinformation. They started a hotline where anyone could report where they saw signature gatherers and what they were saying to voters. But the unions did something else, too. They hit the grocery stores with their own hordes of signature gatherers asking people to sign signature withdrawal requests. This caused quite a bit of confusion at first; I was now getting messages from people who were being petitioned by signature withdrawal gatherers claiming to be on the side of the unions, and because of all the misleading activity from the hotels and airline signature gatherers, people naturally thought the signature withdrawal gatherers were lying. But it ended up being an extremely strategic way to get the right message out into the streets. And not only were the unions out there preemptively gathering withdrawal requests, there was also an online portal to direct people to where anyone who had already signed could revoke their signature by printing and mailing a PDF to the county registrar.

I'll add one more pretty incredible thing. These unions did all this mobilizing starting the first week in June, as ICE raids and protests and curfews meant fewer people were in public places in general and just being outside meant risking being kidnapped by federal agents.

In the end, the unions gathered 117,607 signature withdrawal requests — a fairly astonishing feat in itself as it was nearly as many signatures as were collected by the hotels and airlines! But it was still a huge gamble. Would enough valid signatures and withdrawn signatures match up to actually cancel out what was gathered?

The math, in fact, mathed. The hotels and airlines effort came up 8,991 signatures short. Had those 17,082 signatures not been withdrawn by union organizing, I think we could assume this referendum would be sailing to the ballot.

"This outcome sends a clear message to corporate interests in LA and across the country," said LA City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, a former Unite Here organizer who has been one of a handful of officials actually expressing concerns about what the Olympics and Paralympics are leaving behind. "Working people can fight and win, no matter how much money or misinformation is used to stop us."

This is also a huge win for the Fair Games coalition, where just last month some of LA's largest unions joined the tourism unions to present their demands to LA28, including the immediate implementation of the Olympic wage ordinance. By the time July 2028 rolls around, the people who are ensuring the largest gathering in U.S. history is running smoothly — people like Jovan Houston — will be making the highest minimum wage in the country.

Why is this important? Because LA28 isn't coming to save us. Because the city does not have a plan. Because there are no more legacy improvements in the queue. Because fascism is no way to woo international tourists. All we can hope for at this point is to have the city set up to capture as much money as possible when these megaevents happen: by collecting tourism taxes and sales taxes, by awarding contracts to local businesses, and by depositing those dollars directly in the pockets of workers. And these workers, who have a whole vision for what the city should look like post-2028, just proved what they were capable of achieving. If I was Casey Wasserman, I'd be beating down the doors to work with this coalition — they could make him look like a hero!

Instead, LA28 has the extraordinarily bad optics of its sponsors spending millions of dollars to take wages away from the very workers it needs to make the games run. "The ruthless greed of Delta, United, and Marriott was matched only by their arrogance," said Kurt Petersen, Unite Here Local 11's co-president. "We thank the people of Los Angeles for standing with us. Together, we will not only defend the Olympic wage — we will ensure that the Olympics and Paralympics lift up our city, not line the pockets of greedy CEOs."

At a Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy event I spoke at on Sunday, my fellow panelists, which included union representatives who had been fighting for the Olympic wage for years, were understandably on pins and needles about the signature tally being announced the next day. But Petersen was confident regardless of the outcome. "We organized," he said. "We've already won." 🔥