A new study links the city’s investment in its tourism industry to a working class stuck in poverty

PHOTO by BILL GEAL

Several members of the Long Beach City Council—and at least two candidates for its vacant First District seat—are expressing support for a review and analysis of the city’s long and expensive investment in its tourism industry.

A report entitled “A Tale of Two Cities”—released today (Feb. 4) by a coalition of Long Beach and Los Angeles labor organizations—calls for just such a reassessment of the city’s longtime economic strategies.

The report presents detailed evidence that the more than $750 million in taxpayer money spent on tourist-industry subsidies since the early 1980s has produced a skin-deep prosperity in downtown Long Beach that has not seeped into a general-public benefit. Instead, the report contends that the tourist industry has created a working class paid so poorly and offered so little chance for advancement that it is stuck in poverty—which taxpayers must further subsidize through public health and welfare services. This is what happens when the average hotel worker is paid $19,000 a year.

“I think it’s a good time to look at many policies that affect an industry that produces such a high percentage of jobs in our city,” says Suja Lowenthal, the council member whose Second District includes nearly all of Long Beach’s tourist- and convention-related hotels and attractions.

A spot survey of council members Patrick O’Donnell, Gerrie Schipske, Dee Andrews and Tonia Reyes Uranga evoked similarly supportive sentiments.

The report was compiled by labor organizations—specifically, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy—and its conclusions about the condition of the largely nonunion tourism work force aren’t exactly surprising. But the 51-page document is remarkably free of incendiary language, relying on evidence it often culled from city archives to make its case—and to create its shock value.

Or are you blasé about the $81.4 million the city has poured into the Long Beach Hyatt? The $104.7 million it shelled out on the Pike and Queensway Bay Project? The $53.4 million it has already spent on the Aquarium of the Pacific, with decades of payments to go? It almost feels like a mercy that the report doesn’t mention the Queen Mary.

The report is also measured in its recommendations to city leaders, which essentially boil down to common-sense calls for accountability: a full audit of hotel leases and redevelopment agreements; city hearings on the costs and benefits of the tourism industry to Long Beach residents; requiring a Community Benefits Impact Study for all future city agreements assisting hotel development; and exploring policy options for raising working standards at hotels.

The call for public hearings seems the most dramatic, but First District Council candidates Rick Berry and Robert Garcia—competing to represent the city’s other downtown district—say they agree with this recommendation.

“That’s definitely a good idea,” says Berry, speaking by cell phone Saturday afternoon while campaigning door-to-door near 19th and Santa Fe Avenue—you could hear dogs barking in the background. “In talking to people in the neighborhoods, my view is that the subsidized low-income housing the Redevelopment Agency has created is also a subsidy for the hotels. They have a captive, minimum-wage work force crammed into the First District.”

Garcia says if he is elected, he would actually call for such hearings.

“Absolutely,” Garcia says. “It’s appropriate and timely to have a discussion about the wages of the people who work in the hotel and tourism industry in Long Beach. Everyone should be at the table—policy makers, labor, business people, hotel owners and, most importantly, the workers, the ones cleaning the rooms, serving the food, providing the services. I couldn’t imagine anyone being against that.”

(Interestingly, Garcia just received the endorsement of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. In 2007, the Chamber’s CEO Randy Gordon used the threat of an expensive election to defeat a Labor Peace Agreement that would have given employees at hotels located on city land the right to collectively bargain for better wages and conditions.)

Lowenthal and other council members who express support for a cost-and-benefits review of the tourism industry aren’t quite so gung-ho about holding hearings.

“When I think of public hearings, I think of something punitive,” says Lowenthal. “But if you’re talking about extracting information and providing it to everyone, I’d be interested.”

“I’d support a study session,” says Seventh District Council member Tonia Reyes Uranga. “The problem with hearings is you get the CVB [Convention & Visitors Bureau] people on one side and the labor people on the other; the only people who show up are those who you already know where they stand.”

“There’s going to be a town hall meeting on this subject at Cal State Long Beach on Feb. 26,” says Fifth District Council member Gerrie Schipske, “and nothing works better than the community conducting its own meetings. Based on what happens there, the council might be in a position to hold hearings.”

Present circumstances are probably not what was in mind when Long Beach—beset by the simultaneous disintegration of the aerospace, shipbuilding and fishing industries, not to mention the departure of the U.S. Navy—set out to transform itself from a manufacturing center to a tourist destination. But somehow, the middle-class technicians, machinists and cannery workers at McDonnell-Douglas, Todd Shipyard and StarKist Tuna have been replaced by low-wage waiters, ticket-takers and housekeepers who are paid less in Long Beach than in surrounding cities.

“To me, that’s criminal,” says O’Donnell. “The original goal was to develop something that would produce economic benefit, not economic burden. The tourism industry should be a path to the middle class. The city of Long Beach has actively and financially supported the development of the tourism industry, and it’s a reasonable position to say the tourism industry should support Long Beach, as well.”

A TALE OF TWO CITIES: HOW LONG BEACH’S INVESTMENT IN DOWNTOWN TOURISM HAS CONTRIBUTED TO POVERTY NEXT DOOR PREPARED BY LOS ANGELES ALLIANCE FOR A NEW ECONOMY, ON BEHALF OF LONG BEACH COALITION FOR GOOD JOBS AND A HEALTHY COMMUNITY | AVAILABLE AT GOODJOBSLONGBEACH.ORG.

Tags: Aquarium of the Pacific, hotel works, Long Beach, middle class, poverty, Queen Mary, tourism