Good thing we leave it to labor unions and liberal politicians to stifle tourism, in this case in New York City, and then repeat the mistake.
While the 62 million tourists who visited New York City last year fell short of the number of visitors the city attracted before the pandemic, tourism’s economic impact was at an all-time high, estimated at $74 billion in total unadjusted inflation spending, the worst in 40 years, and $48 billion in direct spending. Nearly one in 10 workers in America’s most visited city works in the tourism industry, and tourism generates an estimated $7 billion in local tax revenue and $5 billion in revenue for the City of Albany.
But New York City’s hotel rates average about $300 a night, more than any other city in the country except Boston, and the problem seems to get worse the more left-leaning policies are implemented.
To shelter 65,000 immigrants in sanctuary cities would require the closure of 16,500 hotel rooms. Already, one in five hotel rooms are being used to steal revenue rather than generate it, and the city is paying significantly below market rate. This puts upward pressure on prices for the remaining rooms, making it harder for hotels to pay.
Now city councillors are trying to take the issue further, with Councillor Julie Mennin proposing to ban hotels from outsourcing certain services and require them to employ unionised staff.
The proposed bill would require hotels to pay a $200 annual license fee and, even more egregious, would require all hotels to “directly employ all core and essential employees” and would prohibit hotels from “contracting out any core and essential employees to a third party unless a majority of all core and essential employees have a valid, active, and unexpired collective bargaining agreement with a labor union.” The bill specifically defines “core” and “essential” employees as those employees who fall into the following occupational categories: “housekeeping, front desk or front desk service,” “engineering,” “food preparation, food service, or security.”
After all, the bill would require nearly 10 percent of the city’s workers to unionize overnight. Most of the city’s 700 hotels are not unionized, leading Vijay Dandapani, president and CEO of the New York City Hotel Association, to liken the bill to a “nuclear bomb” that would devastate the industry.
Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said the bill would “impair the ability of many small and medium-sized hotels to maintain stable operations in a tough labor market.” The ratio of job seekers to job openings is set to remain at its lowest level in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ records through 2023, with at least five job openings for every four job seekers as of May of this year.
Supporters of the bill argue that its primary purpose is to ensure health and safety standards in hotels, but it’s better understood as another front in a national effort to dismantle the gig economy and restore Democrats’ most valuable source of funding: unionization.Mennin’s bill was introduced at the same time as the National Labor Relations Board acknowledged defeat for the Biden administration’s failed “joint employer” attempt to hold prime contractors and franchisees liable when subcontractors and franchisees are sued.
The NLRB rule would significantly expand the scope of union membership to include temporary workers employed by temporary staffing agencies, exposing hotels to legal risk for the actions of those agencies. It seems no coincidence that Mennin immediately replaced the joint employer rule with his own local structure.
An exorbitantly expensive vacation in the city that never sleeps isn’t the biggest risk of New York City’s bill. Rather, it’s part of a larger national effort to use left-leaning states to make bad big government ideas the norm and nationalize them. California’s economically self-defeating strategy to criminalize gig workers, from Uber drivers to Hollywood screenwriters, is an afterthought in the national war on labor rights. Democrats in Congress have repeatedly pushed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or the so-called “PRO” Act. Only a Senate filibuster could stop this gig-job-killing bill from becoming law.
California’s AB5 is the state’s version of the PRO Act, which resulted in a 10.5% decline in self-employment and a 4.4% decline in total employment with no increase in W-2 employment across all affected industries.Yet President Joe Biden and his party’s running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, continue to wholeheartedly support the disaster that is the national bill.
To read more from the Washington Examiner, click here
There is no reason to think that the hotel licensing bill wouldn’t become a national model in the same way. It would raise prices out of reach for many tourists and cut direct jobs and tax revenues for the city and state. But the left has never let trivial issues of economic reality, money and common sense get in the way of its fight for labor rights.
The contractual arrangements between hotels and those who want to work there should be outside the government’s jurisdiction, but the interventionist left always pretends to believe they know how to do the job better than the people who actually do it, when they just don’t care about their jobs at all.
