Action of the Week: Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and Healthy Communities
Thursday, July 10
As soon as I drove into downtown Long Beach, I saw a big cardboard cut-out of a chef surrounded by a plethora of picketers. Sweet, I must be in the right place.
Members of the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and Healthy Communities – hotel workers and community supporters – all gathered outside the Hilton in downtown Long Beach. The protest stayed in the proximity of the tourist-friendly Pike – the dandified and Disneyfied Bubba Gump’s version of the scary and toothless Pike of Long Beach’s scary and toothless Navy years. They marched past the Aquarium and the Ferris wheel, then rallied past the boat docks, attractions that make outsiders like myself “ooh” and “ahh” and think, wow, this place has some character! Well, sure – when the city has spent more than $450 million to redevelop Pine Avenue and its twee environs and subsidize hotel projects and tourist attractions, of course visitors will eat that shit up.
According to The District Weekly, Long Beach contributed $6.7 million in subsidies to the Hyatt from the city’s Tidelands Trust for construction costs and secured for the hotel a $3 million federal grant, charging just $200,000 a year in rent for 8.5 acres of waterfront land in return for an expected profit of $21 million in its first 10 years. But it didn’t work out in the city’s favor. By 1994, the hotel hadn’t paid a penny of rent and owed the city $27 million. Combined with tourist attractions still mired in debt, the city continues to dig itself into a deeper hole.
Meanwhile, despite the subsidies, the lack of rent, and occupancy rates that are third highest in the country, Long Beach’s hotels employ workers who are grossly underpaid, said Kristine Zentgraf, a member of the Long Beach Immigration Coalition and a Cal State professor. “It’s time the hotels played a more positive role to [their workers].”
In a sea of people with signs around their neck reading, “We are the heart of Long Beach,” banging drums, and even a “Yes We Can” sign, I chatted with single mother Myesia Mimms, a front desk clerk at the Hilton for over three years. Mimms lives in the city, like most of her fellow employees, paying $800 a month in rent while making $10 an hour. Her two-year-old son has health care, but Mimms has none for herself.
“If you’re not white, you can’t go higher,” Mimms explained when she attempted to go to different departments. “They should give us respect, or at least affordable health care.”
Most of these workers can’t afford health insurance and rely on second jobs or public assistance. Long Beach currently has at least 11 hotel projects with more than 1,200 rooms in various stages of the planning process. The Coalition and its workers hope that while the hotel industry is increasing, they won’t continue to be left behind.
Published: 07/16/2008
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