A growing coalition of Anaheim businesses and residents has raised more than $500,000 to fight hotel union-sponsored Measure A initiative that would impose costly wage and work rule mandates on all Anaheim hotels and event centers regardless of size. Experts estimate the cost to the city budget alone in lost revenue and higher labor costs to be in the tens of millions of dollars over time.
The initiative is sponsored by UNITE-HERE Local 11, a militant hotel workers union currently conducting a rolling strike across LA and Orange counties, disrupting hospitality businesses and demanding concessions such as $30 an hour.
Although local media outlets like the Voice of OC lump all the impacted businesses together as corporate “Resort interests” and paint them as overly-powerful, the reality is most Anaheim hotels and event centers are small- and medium-sized businesses that are independently owned and operated, often by the same families for generations. Furthermore, they traditionally have not been closely engaged in city politics, preferring to focus on running their businesses.
The UNITE-HERE’s Measure A has changed all that. If approved in the October 3, 2023 special election, hundreds of affected businesses will have only 10 days to implement its complicated and costly provisions or risk expensive litigation. For many, Measure A poses an existential threat to the viability of their businesses.
UNITE-HERE has unintentionally awakened a sleeping giant and galvanized a broad coalition of small business and residents concerned about Measure A’s dire impacts on their businesses, the city’s economy and its ability to fund vital public services. At city council meetings in May and June, this coalition flipped the script on UNITE-HERE, out-organizing them and filling the council chambers with family hotel owners and their employees who voiced their opposition to Measure A.
Despite claiming Measure A was urgently needed to address worker safety and working conditions, UNITE-HERE Local 11 co-president Ada Briceno and several union members called on the city council to delay voting on their initiative until November 2024, in hopes voter turnout in a presidential election would help Measure A pass.
While Mayor Ashleigh Aitken and Councilman Carlos Leon sided with the union, the other five council members voted for a stand-alone special election in order to resolve the issue more quickly and with greater voter clarity about the stakes.
Among the negative impacts cited by opponents:
- A hit of at least $8.6 million to the city’s General Fund in its first year.
- Reducing revenue from the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) by $4 million annually beginning in 2027.
- Increasing Angels Stadium and the Honda Center’s operating budget by 19 percent.
- Increasing costs for libraries, the YMCA, schools, and religious institutions.
- Delaying and potentially halting hotel construction and renovation in Anaheim, eliminating thousands of good-paying union and non-union jobs for carpenters, electricians, and plumbers.
$500,000 is a huge sum to raise quickly from small businesses, and is a sign of the depth of the opposition to Measure A by Anaheim businesses and concerned residents who ordinarily engaged in city campaigns with such intensity.
The coalition, going bony the unwieldy name of “Anaheim Residents Against Cuts to Essential City Services” has garnered the support of more than 100 Anaheim businesses and residents since forming in mid-May.
“Anaheim residents are voting with their wallets,” said Dara Maleki, an Anaheim resident and business owner. “The more they learn about how Measure A will gut vital police and fire funding, the more they will oppose the measure.”
