Dear John,

I’m writing to you today to let you know about an unprecedented milestone for working people here in Los Angeles. Despite an all-out attack by billionaires and giant corporations, our Defend the Wage coalition, anchored by UNITE HERE! Local 11, SEIU-USWW, and LAANE and supported by countless community allies, did what many predicted was impossible. Together, we were able to successfully force a corporate-backed referendum campaign—one that seeks to cut hard-won wage increases and healthcare for workers—into a hand count. 

For over two years, LAANE has fought alongside the people who keep our tourism industry running—airport workers, hotel housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers, and airline catering personnel—to win an “Olympic Wage” that would raise their wages to $30 by the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games and provide access to family health insurance.

But immediately after the Los Angeles City Council passed the ordinance in May, a group of airline and hotel corporations, as well as industry lobby groups, launched a signature-gathering campaign to overturn the living wage and healthcare protections. Recent campaign filings have revealed that the funders - who include Delta, United, the American Hotel and Lodging Association (whose members include Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott), and Airlines For America (whose members include American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest in addition to Delta and United), contributed nearly $3 million on the referendum petition campaign. To gather enough signatures, the campaign misled Angelenos to get them to sign on, in some cases  by telling voters it would raise wages when in fact it would do the opposite. 

Los Angeles County officials have now released the results of the initial sample count of signatures for this anti-worker campaign. The weak verification results mean that this corporate-backed referendum failed to qualify outright. 

That’s huge news.

Why? Because volunteers—including many of you!—talked to their neighbors and spread the truth about this misleading campaign, and a record of more than 120,000 Angelenos submitted forms to revoke their petition signatures once they learned the truth about it. Those revocations were taken into consideration during the sample count of the petitions and had a massive impact on today’s historic outcome. Without those revocations, this referendum campaign would’ve qualified outright.  

Now, the campaign will go to a full hand count of the signatures gathered. We won’t know the full results of the signature verification until September, but we do know this: CEOs had millions of dollars to spend, but we had the people power, and we made sure the corporations and bosses couldn’t buy their way out so easily.

To be clear, despite this incredible step towards victory, this corporate-backed attack has already incurred real damages. Tourism workers should have gotten their living wage raises and healthcare protections back on July 1st. This referendum campaign has now delayed those benefits for months, and in the meantime many workers are struggling to stay housed and access health insurance for their families. We know that workers will win in the end, but we cannot ignore how dangerous it is when big businesses delay and block the real protections their workers need and deserve. 

I’ll make sure to keep you updated when the full results are available, but we should all remain optimistic and encouraged that billionaires and corporations can’t just spend millions to defeat el pueblo unido. Together, there’s nothing we can’t win.