Los Angeles just did what real progressive cities do: it voted to raise hotel worker wages to $30 an hour by 2028, starting with $22.50 next summer and jumping up in clean $2.50 steps each year. Workers get not just higher pay, but an $8.35/hour health stipend starting in 2026. That’s dignity with a dollar sign.
West Hollywood? Still playing small. Hotel workers here make $19.61 today and are set to reach only $20.22 by July—after that, they’re chained to a CPI formula that maxes out at a 4% raise per year. Even if inflation runs high, that puts them around $22.75 by 2028, if they’re lucky. A $7+ gap every hour for the same labor, same hotels, same billionaire owners.
Danny Hang says he believes the minimum wage should be $40. Great. So where’s the ordinance?
John Erickson says West Hollywood led the nation on wages. That was in 2022. We’ve been lapped.
Mayor Chelsea Byers wields the gavel and the rhetoric, but she hasn’t put a $30 wage on the agenda.
They have the majority. They could act. They haven’t.
West Hollywood’s brand is built on service workers. It’s a city of housekeepers, dishwashers, bellhops, and janitors who power luxury for people who will never learn their names. The city profits off their backs. But when it’s time to raise wages? Suddenly everyone in City Hall gets cold feet and starts talking like a Chamber of Commerce intern.
Enough.
This council can and must:
- Match Los Angeles’ schedule immediately: $22.50 in 2025, $25 in 2026, $27.50 in 2027, $30 in 2028
- Add the health-care supplement
- Draft the next step: a $40 living wage ordinance by 2030
- Fund enforcement and end the wage theft that thrives in the gaps
If you’re too afraid of corporate pushback to raise the wage, get out of the way. Workers are done waiting. They will strike. They will organize. And they will remember who stood with them—and who stood aside.
