On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to delay implementation of the Citywide Hotel Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance by two years.
The mandate, also called the “Olympic Wage” ordinance, was previously scheduled to raise the minimum wage for hospitality workers to $30 starting July 1, 2028, ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. However, the City Council has now moved to delay the implementation of that $30 wage to 2030. Hotels will still be required to pay workers $25 per hour starting this July, with yearly incremental increases through 2030.
In an 11-4 vote, the City Council approved the delayed implementation schedule, which was proposed earlier this month. The council voted to advance the proposal in a “placeholder” motion last week, allowing city officials, hospitality organizations and labor unions to continue negotiations around what LA City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson called an “extremely divisive issue” on Tuesday.
Over the last year, the ordinance has been a hotly debated topic among hospitality industry associations, which oppose the legislation, and hotel workers, who claim the wage increases are needed to keep up with the rising cost of living in Los Angeles.
Industry intervention
The City Council’s vote came after opponents of the wage increase, including the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, gathered enough signatures to qualify a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot that would repeal the city’s gross receipts tax, AAHOA detailed in a May 14 news release. The measure had the potential to remove some $740 million from the city’s general fund in the first year alone, impacting funding for police, firefighters, homelessness programs and other services.
Supporters of the ballot measure, including other airline and hotel industry groups, indicated they would withdraw the effort if the city delayed or halted implementation of the proposed $30 hourly minimum wage, per the release.
Following the City Council’s Tuesday vote to delay, American Hotel & Lodging Association President and CEO Rosanna Maietta said the city “took an important step to provide the hotel industry with the relief it desperately needed.”
Maietta previously stated the ordinance would “jeopardize jobs, push hotels to the brink of closure, severely cut tax revenue the city desperately needs, and leave the city grossly unprepared for the 2028 Olympic Games.”
While the Tuesday vote “represents a shift in the political dynamics” in Los Angeles, with city leaders more willing to engage directly with business leaders, the city “still remains an exceptionally challenging operating environment for the hotel industry,” Maietta said.
According to an April AHLA report, hotel development has slowed in Los Angeles, while investment has shifted to other markets and hotels have laid off staff to contend with rising costs that outpace revenue growth.
One of AHLA’s top policy priorities of 2026 is opposing “hotel-specific compensation and benefits mandates untethered from economic conditions,” including that in effect in Los Angeles, the association previously shared with Hotel Dive.
A broken promise
While hotel industry associations applauded the City Council’s Tuesday vote, it served as a blow to LA’s hospitality workforce, which has advocated for the implementation of a $30 minimum wage ahead of the Olympics.
With its “majority vote for an ordinance that will weaken the Olympic Wage,” the LA City Council “broke its promise to hotel and airport workers, capitulating to billionaire corporations,” the Fair Games Coalition, a group of 75 organizations including unions, community groups, housing advocates and immigration leaders, said in a Tuesday statement obtained by Hotel Dive.
Since the Tuesday vote was not unanimous, the council will vote on the new wage schedule again next week, the Los Angeles Times reported. LA council members Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martinez cast the four “no” votes in the Tuesday poll.
