For two years, Los Angeles hotel and airport workers fought for what became known as the Olympic Wage, a phased increase that would lift their minimum pay from 22.50 to 30 dollars an hour by 2028. They rallied across the city, lined up for hours to testify at City Hall, and ultimately beat back a business-funded referendum that failed to gather enough signatures this fall. When the repeal campaign collapsed, the law finally took effect and workers began to see the first increases in their paychecks. It seemed like the fight was over.

Now the City Council president is reopening that fight. In a motion filed Friday, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson proposes delaying the full $30 wage until 2030. He previously voted for the original 2028 timeline and helped move it through council. His office now says only that the city is engaged in negotiations with unnamed partners and has offered no explanation for why the deal workers already won should be reopened.

Labor organizations responded immediately. Yvonne Wheeler of the LA County Federation of Labor said, “These workers fought for more than two years to improve their working conditions, only to have the very people who should defend them try to take it all away. It’s heartless, it’s callous, and it deepens the crisis of working poverty that is gripping our city.” Unite Here Local 11 and SEIU United Service Workers West called the motion a setback manufactured by corporate pressure rather than any genuine need to revisit the wage timeline.

The broader context makes the reversal even more troubling. Over the summer, airlines, hotel chains, and major business groups filed a ballot initiative to repeal the city business tax, a revenue source that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The LA Area Chamber of Commerce explicitly tied that effort to the Olympic Wage. Unite Here filed its own set of ballot measures to give residents a vote on large hotel developments and raise wages citywide. City leaders encouraged negotiations to prevent a clash at the ballot box.

But the idea that the business coalition’s repeal measure would actually succeed misunderstands both the city’s history and the political moment. Voters here have repeatedly chosen economic justice when given a real choice. They passed Measure ULA in 2022, taxing luxury real estate sales to fund affordable housing. They supported statewide taxes on high earners to preserve school and service funding through Prop 30 and Prop 55. Even nationally, voters across the political spectrum have approved minimum wage hikes and pro-worker measures again and again, from Alaska to Missouri. It seems unlikely that Angelenos would gut the general fund to reward the same industries trying to roll back worker gains. Yet City Hall is behaving as though this business-backed repeal is a foregone conclusion and the only strategy is to retreat early, even if it means stripping workers of what they already won. It is another example of how democratic decisions fall away when powerful interests threaten to take the fight to the ballot.

Harris-Dawson’s proposal would push the full wage increase into 2030, long after the Olympics and long after the workers who keep the tourism industry running will have endured the strain of the city’s biggest global event. The business coalition, for its part, has signaled approval of the delay while continuing to advance its repeal measure, a dynamic that only underscores the imbalance in who City Hall is choosing to accommodate. The motion now heads to the committees on tourism, jobs, and economic development. Workers and their unions are preparing to return to City Hall to defend a raise they already secured through organizing, public testimony, and the defeat of a repeal attempt.