Overtime regulations, new human trafficking training regulations that take effect next year, and efforts to eliminate sexual harassment are at the forefront of the latest batch of labor issues taking aim at the hospitality and tourism sector.
“Hotels by nature are very labor oriented, but the labor issues are expanding,” said Eric Dean, a partner at FitzGerald Yap Kreditor LLP in Irvine.
Long Beach has recently become a hub for these issues, and Orange County hotel executives are watching to see if measures facing that city’s collection of hotels—which affect nearly 5,000 rooms there—make their way further south.
An initiative passed by Long Beach voters in November sought to implement additional safety regulations in hotels: Measure WW, the Hotel Workplace Requirements and Restrictions Initiative Ordinance.
The new regulation is also known as the “Panic Button Initiative.”
The initiative mandates that all hotels with more than 50 rooms in Long Beach provide panic buttons for workers to protect them against sexual assault and give workers who are assaulted paid time off, and the right to reassignment. It also addresses overtime, and limits the amount of space that housekeepers can clean per shift.
The new law has brought about a lawsuit of its own.
The California Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group representing the state’s lodging industry, sued the city of Long Beach in January, calling for a ban of Measure WW, claiming it “violates the authority of the state’s regulatory agency [the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration] to adopt workplace safety standards.”
Critics also charged that the law unfairly benefitted hotels that employ unionized workers.
Unionized hotels have the ability to waive the regulations through the collective bargaining process, according to a blog post last month by Marta M. Fernandez, a lawyer in the L.A. and Irvine offices of Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP, who is part of that firm’s global hospitality group.
“Under the guise of protecting workers, the ordinance gives an unfair advantage to union hotels in Long Beach,” Fernandez wrote on the HotelLawBlog.com website.
“The union’s message to union-free hotel owners in Long Beach is loud and clear: If you want the same advantages as union hotels, you have to negotiate neutrality agreements with us.”
In OC, union efforts helped push the passing of a new minimum wage requirement in Anaheim, which applies to hotels whose developers take certain city tax subsidies for their projects.
Long Beach’s Measure WW dovetails with similar statewide efforts; it follows statewide legislation regarding sexual harassment passed by California Governor Jerry Brown in September.
Senate Bill 1343 requires businesses with at least five employees to provide sexual harassment prevention training to supervisors and nonsupervisory employees by 2020.
Online Issues
Even the digital extensions of a hotel are coming under increased legal scrutiny, in relation to ADA accessibility.
The ADA Act, or The Americans with Disabilities Act, is not new by any means—it first became law in 1990 to address discrimination against individuals with disabilities.
In the hospitality world, it has largely been used with the construction or renovation of hotels, but in recent years, it has prompted businesses to look for a way to also make their technology compliant accessible to more people.
“ADA website accessibility is a relatively new concern that is growing rapidly,” FitzGerald Yap’s Dean said. “Businesses are looking in to see whether people with disabilities, like those who have difficulty seeing or hearing, can use their website.”
These upgrades are not only positive from a proactive standpoint, Dean argues, but they also help businesses, specifically hotels, reduce their exposure to serial litigators, or individuals who file lawsuits in bulk for profit.
Dean, also the founder of the Association of Hospitality Professionals, said his clients have had to set aside funds to settle claims, which can surpass $10,000 in some cases.
He has noticed an increase in consulting companies that specialize in ADA compliance to help companies avoid these claims, and connect them with technology solutions.
San Diego-based Certified Access Services is one of such companies. The firm assesses businesses—including several Orange County hotels—on their ADA property and website compliance.
Parking lots, restrooms and restaurants remain the top targets of lawsuits, but websites are becoming a growing point of contention.
“A couple years ago, maybe one out of every 10 lawsuits we saw filed against a hotel was about website compliance, and that rose to about five out of 10 last year,” said Certified Access Services co-founder Tracey Delisle.
“It’s important that properties know what their exposure is.”
The company has been making the rounds to meet with hotel and restaurant associations, like the Association of Hospitality Professionals, to educate them on ADA laws, as well as connect firms with technology companies and designers.
“Lawsuits are being filed quicker than the hospitality industry can respond,” Delisle said, adding that a lack of guidelines for ADA-compliant website design has made the task challenging.
“This is a huge opportunity for website developers, and I expect we will start to see a lot more products that are addressed to this issue.”
