By: Emily Ao

Just as tourists flood into Southern California for the holidays, hotel workers walked off their jobs, demanding higher pay. According to the New York Times, Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, says that “workers have been pent up and frustrated and angry about what’s happened during the pandemic combined with the inability to pay their rent to stay in Los Angeles.”

In other words, rising inflation and surging rent prices have caused a lot of people to struggle to afford housing. Some have even lost their homes.

Hotels are also taking in more and more tourists. This means that, although hotels cannot afford to pay their workers, that extra work makes hotel housekeepers more stressed, frustrated, and angry.

Diana Rios-Sanchez, who is a housekeeper at InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown, says her wage is not keeping up with inflation. Rios-Sanchez and her three children live in a one-bedroom apartment, and she worries that they might not be able to last for long.

“We take care of the tourists, but no one takes care of us,” she says.

On the other hand, hotels say that inflation is also hard on them. Hotel owners claim that bills and other expenses take up a lot of the money earned from tourists, making it hard to pay workers fairly and justly.

Hotels have tried reaching out, but despite their efforts, thousands of hotel workers, along with other workers such as dockworkers and screenwriters, are continuing to walk off their job daily, demanding better treatment, hoping that after all this, they will get what they deserve.

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