In a shameful move, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced legislation to take money from hard-working Angelenos and give the trillion-dollar airline industry a break

Airport workers at LAX who are members of SEIU-United Service Workers West and UNITE HERE Local 11 are sounding the alarm after Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson introduced a motion to substantially weaken the Olympic Wage Ordinance, which was passed by the City Council in May and survived a failed referendum effort paid for by airlines and hotel corporations.

Under the existing law, tourism workers are on track to reach $30 an hour by 2028, a long-overdue wage that reflects the high cost of living in Los Angeles and the essential work LAX workers do to keep our region’s economy running. Harris-Dawson’s new motion would delay those increases until 2030, effectively taking money out of workers’ pockets with the lowest paid full-time workers without health coverage losing nearly $35,000 as a result of the proposed shift and handing it back to billion-dollar airline corporations, while the airline industry is expected to surpass $1 trillion for the first time ever, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA)’s financial projections. The motion also proposes creating major loopholes that would result in even further losses of healthcare and wages to airport workers and exclude hotel restaurant workers.

Workers call the move unprecedented, shameful, and a betrayal of the commitments the City made to the people who keep LAX running. Airport workers, many of whom struggled through the pandemic and continue to face compounding crises of rising rents, food prices, and transportation costs, are demanding that Council President Harris-Dawson immediately withdraw the motion, and that Mayor Karen Bass publicly affirm that she stands with airport workers, not corporate airlines.