Dive Brief:
- Hyatt Hotels will pay $2.25 million to settle a lawsuit under a “Housekeepers’ Bill of Rights” law in Long Beach, California, hospitality union Unite Here Local 11 shared in a release obtained by Hotel Dive.
- The suit was filed in February 2023 by union housekeepers at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach who claimed their employer did not comply with the Long Beach Hotel Working Conditions Initiative, a law guaranteeing protections for housekeepers in the Southern California city. The rule also mandates panic buttons and other measures designed to protect hotel employees from sexual assault.
- The suit was the first of its kind under the initiative, which was enacted in 2018 and is one of a handful of city-level regulations created in recent years to secure protections for hotel employees.
Dive Insight:
The Long Beach Hotel Working Conditions Initiative prohibits hotels from requiring housekeepers to clean more than 4,000 square feet of floor space in any eight-hour workday unless the hotel pays twice the housekeeper’s regular rate for all hours worked that day.
The lawsuit’s plaintiffs, Michelle Bain and Carmen Luna, claimed Hyatt Regency Long Beach failed to pay them the requisite double pay as required by the law. They also claimed that Hyatt violated the initiative by failing to make workload records available to employees in a timely fashion or obtain written consent from employees working more than 10 hours in a day.
The lawsuit also claimed that Hyatt’s policy of requiring room attendants to carry heavy workloads prevented workers from taking all of the 10-minute rest breaks guaranteed to them under the California Labor Code.
Hyatt did not respond to a Hotel Dive request for comment.
Similar “Housekeepers’ Bill of Rights” laws, which are intended to improve housekeepers’ working conditions, are in effect in several California cities, including Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Monica, Emeryville, Glendale, West Hollywood and Irvine, as well as Seattle.
“Hotel management everywhere should be on notice that hotel workers will not only fight to pass these laws — they will keep fighting until their rights are fully respected,” Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, said in a statement Tuesday.
Unite Here Local 11 represents more than 32,000 hospitality workers in Southern California and Arizona.
In May 2023, a housekeeper at another Hyatt property, Andaz West Hollywood, filed a similar class-action lawsuit claiming Hyatt had violated the West Hollywood Hotel Worker Protection Ordinance by not paying the required overpay.
In July of that year, a different housekeeper in Irvine alleged in another such suit that Hilton Irvine failed to provide functioning panic buttons to staff as required by the Irvine Hotel Worker Protection Ordinance.
