Los Angeles Passes US’s Highest Minimum Wage as Labor Prepares for 2028 Olympics

The Los Angeles City Council this month passed a law requiring hotel staff and airport catering industry workers be paid at least $30 per hour and given comprehensive health benefits by July 1, 2028. The minimum wage will be raised to $22.50 this year and increase by $2.50 each July for the next three years. This is a huge victory for UNITE HERE Local 11, the union that campaigned for the legislation, and represents the highest minimum wage in the country. (California’s statewide minimum is currently set at $16.50, and the highest minimum wage in the country currently is in D.C., with a $17.50 floor.) “Put together, it’s extraordinarily high in terms of an economic package employers provide to their workers,” Kurt Petersen, co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11, told Truthout.

UNITE HERE campaigned not only for a wage hike in Los Angeles, but also a mandate that employers pay the equivalent of $8 per hour in health insurance for workers and their families. While many workers already receive good health benefits thanks to existing UNITE HERE contracts, this new law fills in the gaps, essentially ensuring that workers’ health insurance is almost totally covered by employers.

Elisa Valencia, a worker with the airline catering company Flying Food Group, says the new wage will result in tangible changes in her and her family’s life. Valencia was born and raised in Mexico, but migrated to the U.S. because she couldn’t support her children in Michoacan. Those children still live with their grandparents in Mexico, and she has been saving money to reunite her family.

Currently, Valencia earns $20.73 per hour at a job that involves packaging meals for use on long-haul international flights. It is hard work: On any given day, her crew of 13 workers will prepare thousands of food trays for the ticket-holders on a dozen flights. Valencia, who has never herself been on an airplane, stands all day long in Flying Food’s refrigerated warehouse, doing the repetitive work of filling the trays with the food prepared by other crews, sealing each tray and then bending down to put the filled trays in the food carts. Because Flying Food is penalized with a fee if it delivers food to the airlines late, the workers are under continuous pressure to speed up their work.

Valencia nets around $2,400 per month — much of which goes straight to the $1,800 per month rent that she and her husband pay on a small one-bedroom apartment. It’s hardly enough to let her build up a nest egg. Now, with the new wages kicking in, she is hopeful that she will be able to save more rapidly and reunite with her children sooner rather than later. It will, she says, “help us find a better living situation, a bigger apartment, so I can bring my kids over from Mexico. It’s a huge win, and a great first step for those of us who work in tourism — to have our work be valued like that.”

The minimum wage increase is being tied to the summer 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which kick off in mid-July, two weeks after the $30 minimum wage is reached. It brings the wages and benefits of Los Angeles’s hospitality workers in line with those of Las Vegas culinary workers in the wake of a series of high-stakes contract negotiations between the culinary workers union and the large casinos in 2023 and 2024.

For more than two years, unions in Los Angeles have protested what they see as a corporate takeover of the games and a failure by the city to address the needs of the workers who will make the events possible. They have worried that rather than boosting the economic well-being of workers, the games will price them out of their homes and neighborhoods.

The previous Olympics, held last year in Paris, displaced around 20,000 people; organizers in Los Angeles fear the same thing will happen there, with an increased displacement of unhoused people and other already marginalized communities. Activist groups such as NOlympics LA have highlighted the risks of displacement that the Olympics tend to bring in their wake. The local labor movement has made clear that it will use its organizing clout to stop this from happening.

Some have also expressed concern at how much the city will be on the hook for, and where the money will come from if there are — as is almost always the case with the games — budget overruns.

Trade unions such as UNITE HERE Local 11 are hoping to convert the risk that the games present to vulnerable communities into an organizing opportunity. “We believe this wage is the first step to transforming the lives of working people. We think there needs to be a new deal for the Olympics around wages and housing,” Petersen said. That means “lining up as many contracts from as many unions as possible to expire before the Olympics and to strike if needed.” Through highlighting struggles around housing, wages and benefits, unions and their allies in the community are working to ensure that the social contract in Los Angeles is fundamentally recalibrated to better protect workers over the coming years.

More than 100 hotel and catering contracts in and around Los Angeles expire in the run-up to the Olympics, and UNITE HERE Local 11, which has a track record of successfully negotiating numerous pro-labor contracts in Los Angeles and in Phoenix, Arizona, in recent years, has been vocal about its willingness to strike just before the games in order to secure improved wages and benefits for its members. This isn’t, however, a one-union show. In fact, numerous unions in the city have indicated they will embrace a citywide strike on May Day in 2028 unless the city improves working conditions for their members. This is part of a national effort, spearheaded by the United Auto Workers, to unite the labor movement in a general strike on May Day 2028, a goal that, for it to be realized, would take years of planning.