Los Angeles tourism workers have officially won one of the most significant labor victories in recent city history. After months of legal wrangling, referendum drama, and fierce industry opposition, the city’s new “Olympic wage” law will move forward, raising the minimum pay for hotel and airport workers to thirty dollars an hour by 2028. The law had been in jeopardy after a coalition of corporate interests backed a referendum to overturn it. But the campaign failed to gather enough valid signatures, in part because thousands of Angelenos revoked their support after learning the real consequences of the proposed repeal. That left the referendum short of qualifying for the ballot, effectively greenlighting the wage increase to begin as planned.

The win was hard fought. When the ordinance passed in May 2025, the hotel and developer lobbies mounted a loud and coordinated campaign to stop it. The Hotel Association of Los Angeles warned that it might be unable to meet its commitments to provide rooms for the 2028 Olympic Games. Developers said their hotel projects would stall. Industry executives predicted financial ruin. One company said it would halt a Hilton expansion in Universal City. Another CEO claimed investors had already crossed L.A. off the map. Despite this pressure, the City Council passed the law, citing recent union contracts showing that hotels were already able to pay wages even higher than what the ordinance proposed. Dozens of hotels had signed contracts with Unite Here Local 11 in 2024 after rolling strikes, agreeing to raise room attendants’ wages to thirty-five dollars an hour by 2027. Those contracts also restored full staffing levels and brought back mandatory daily room cleanings, demonstrating that wage increases and service improvements could go hand in hand.

The new ordinance raises wages on a gradual timeline. Starting in July 2025, hotel and airport workers will earn twenty-two fifty an hour. That rises to twenty-five in 2026, twenty-seven fifty in 2027, and finally thirty dollars in July 2028. The law also includes health care stipends, ensuring that workers receive an additional eight dollars and thirty-five cents per hour toward medical coverage by 2026. These gains will make a real difference. According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single adult in Los Angeles with one child needs to make nearly forty-nine dollars an hour just to cover basic expenses. Even two working adults with one child would each need to earn nearly twenty-seven an hour to get by. For workers like Brenda Mendoza, a room attendant at the JW Marriott who lives in San Bernardino County and commutes nearly two hundred miles daily with her husband and sons, the new law is life changing. “We want to be paid enough to live where we work,” she said.

Opponents of the wage increase insisted it would wreak havoc on the city’s hospitality sector. They poured millions of dollars into a referendum campaign to block it, but organizers with Unite Here Local 11 and the Defend the Wage LA coalition fought back with public education efforts and a signature revocation campaign. Tens of thousands of residents who had initially signed the petition to repeal the wage increase later submitted forms withdrawing their support, often after learning that the measure would not raise wages but cancel them. After reviewing the petition, the City Clerk determined that nearly forty percent of the signatures were invalid or withdrawn, leaving the referendum well below the threshold to qualify for the ballot.

The business coalition now has thirty days to challenge the decision in court, but for now, the ordinance will go into effect. Despite dire predictions, the economic outlook remains strong. Hotel development in Los Angeles has continued to expand in the years since previous wage increases, and the city is preparing for a string of major events, including the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Olympic Games. Economist David Roland-Host, who was hired by the city to assess the wage law’s impact, estimated that hotels would raise prices by about six percent to cover the cost, and projected that the wage hike would actually help create six thousand new full-time jobs by 2028. He found no evidence that minimum wage increases in California have ever led to mass layoffs. In fact, he argued that the law could be a catalyst for long-term economic growth.