Leave it to unions and liberal politicians to suppress a good thing, in this case, New York City tourism. And then to replicate the errors.
Although the 62 million tourists who visited New York City last year didn’t quite beat the number of tourists the Big Apple attracted before the pandemic, the economic impact of tourism hit record highs, not adjusted for the worst inflation in 40 years, generating an estimated $74 billion overall and $48 billion in direct spending. Nearly 1 in 10 workers in the city, the single most visited destination in America, is employed by the tourism industry, and tourism generates an estimated $7 billion in local tax revenue and $5 billion in revenue to Albany.
But New York City hotel rooms average around $300 a night, more expensive than any others in the nation except those in Boston, and the problem seems to be getting worse the more that leftist policies are implemented.
Sheltering 65,000 migrants in the sanctuary city has meant sequestering 16,500 hotel rooms. Already, 1 in 5 hotel rooms is being used for this revenue-draining rather than revenue-generating purpose, with the city paying well below market rate. This puts upward pressure on prices for the rest of the rooms while making it harder for the hotels to pay their bills.
Now, city lawmakers want to double down on the problem, with Councilwoman Julie Menin proposing to ban hotels from contracting out certain services and force them to employ unionized workers on staff.
The proposed bill would require hotels to pay $200 a year for a license and, more perniciously, mandate that all of them “directly employ all core and critical employees.” It would ban “contracting to any third parties for core and critical employees” unless “a majority of all core and critical employees … are covered by a valid, active, and unexpired collective bargaining agreement” with a union. The bill specifically defines “core” and “critical” employees as those whose job classifications are related to “housekeeping, front desk, front service,” “engineering,” and “food preparation, food service, or security.”
All told, this would require nearly 10% of the city’s workers to be unionized overnight. Most of the city’s 700 hotels are not unionized, so the bill has been likened to a “nuclear bomb” that would flatten the industry by Vijay Dandapani, president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City.
Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, noted that the bill would “ruin the ability of many small-business hotels to maintain consistent operations in this tough labor market.” The ratio of people looking for jobs versus job openings remained at the lowest rate ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics into 2023, with at least five jobs open for every four people looking for work as of this May.
Although the bill’s supporters claim its main purpose is to secure sanitation and safety standards at hotels, it’s better understood as a new front in a national effort to kill the gig economy and revive union membership, which is the Democratic Party’s most prized source of funds. Menin’s bill arrived as the National Labor Relations Board admitted defeat over the Biden administration’s failed “joint employer” attempt that would have held prime contractors and franchisors liable when subcontractors or franchisees were sued.
The NLRB rule would have vastly expanded union membership to include temporary workers from staffing agencies and put hotels in legal jeopardy for the actions of those agencies. It seems not coincidental that Menin replaced the joint employer rule with her own local mechanism immediately.
A prohibitively expensive vacation in the city that never sleeps isn’t even the biggest risk of the New York City bill. Rather, it is part of a larger national effort to use left-wing states to make bad, big-government ideas into the norm and then nationalize them. California’s economically self-cutting strategy to criminalize gig workers, from Uber drivers to Hollywood screenwriters, has been retrofitted into the national war on the right to work. Congressional Democrats repeatedly push for the “Protecting the Right to Organize Act,” the so-called “PRO” Act. Only a Senate filibuster has kept this gig-job-killing legislation from becoming law.
California’s AB5, a state version of the PRO Act, resulted in a 10.5% decrease in self-employment and a 4.4% decrease in overall employment for all affected industries without increasing W-2 employment. That hasn’t stopped President Joe Biden and his party’s next nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, from wholeheartedly endorsing the disaster of the national bill.
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There’s no reason to believe that the hotel licensing bill wouldn’t become a national model in the same vein. It would drive prices out of reach of many tourists, hampering direct employment and tax revenue to the city and state. But the Left has never let little matters of economic reality, dollars, cents, and good sense get in the way of its war on the right to work.
Contractual arrangements between a hotel and someone who wishes to work for it should be none of the government’s business. But the meddling Left always pretends to believe it knows better how work should be done than the people actually doing the work. It never minds its own business.