(cross-posted from The Courage Campaign)
On February 22, juls wrote
Within 72 hours of Mayor Villaraigosa signing the living wage bill, we should see a law suit filed by business interests seeking to repeal it.
Well, Villaraigosa signed it into law on Tuesday and sure enough, a lawsuit was filed hot on its heels on Wednesday. Now it's Thursday and already the ordinance has been blocked, temporarily at least.
A Superior Court judge Wednesday temporarily blocked a new law extending the city's "living wage" to workers at LAX-area hotels from taking effect until May at the earliest.
The ruling, by Judge Dzintra Janavs, came in response to a challenge to the law filed Wednesday by seven of the dozen hotels that would be required to pay all workers a living wage — $10.64 per hour including health benefits — under the new law.
To understand why Judge Janavs ruled this way, let's look back to how we got here…
Late last year, the LA City Council passed a law mandating that LAX area hotels pay their nonunion workers a living wage.
The city's living wage ordinance, which was passed a decade ago, requires that workers at companies that contract with the city be paid wages and benefits equal to $10.64 per hour.
The new law for the first time expands that worker protection to businesses — a dozen Los Angeles International Airport-area hotels — that have no formal financial relationship with the city.
The area business community opposed the ordinance and sought to take it to voters in the form of a ballot referendum to repeal the measure. By December 29, they'd gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot.
A broad business coalition united to spend more than $800,000 to collect more than 103,000 signatures to force the council to back down or put the measure on a ballot referendum.
On January 31, in order to avoid a costly battle, the City Council rescinded the law.
By reaching an agreement in principle with business and labor representatives to rescind and replace the law with new legislation, City Council members and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said they wanted to avoid a costly ballot fight…estimated at $15 million.
That new legislation passed the city council in mid-February and was immediately met with opposition from business leaders. From the LA Chamber of Commerce:
"The substitute ordinance is unacceptable to the business community," it said.
"The new law is not substantially different from the original ordinance – it unfairly mandates the wages of specific businesses that must pay employees and provides no long-term assurance that this unprecedented government control will be limited to these businesses."
Which brings us to where we are now: a blocked living wage ordinance. The lawsuit that was filed on Wednesday to block it argued that by replacing the original ordinance with one that essentially does the same thing,
the council effectively violated the constitutional right to referendum of those citizens who signed the petition.
And to that question
Janavs…said that the hotels had made a "sufficient showing" that they would prevail.
So now the law is blocked until they hold a hearing on May 11 to determine the ordinance's fate.
Temporary or not, this ruling is a win for the Chamber of Commerce and the LAX hotels. The city council acted in good faith by rescinding the original law, presumably believing that by doing so the business community would let the replacement law go into effect.
Not so.
It makes me wonder why the city council even agreed to rescind it in the first place. Yes the ballot referendum would be costly but at least then by May we'd have an answer, which would likely be support on the part of voters for the living wage law, if the Working Californians poll is any indication. Now we have no law and no ballot referendum, just 3 months of a court-mandated freeze.