Hotel Figueroa to hire back workers under deal with union

For months Hotel Figueroa in downtown Los Angeles has been locked in a labor dispute over restaurant staff who were let go after they attempted to unionize.

On Wednesday, the union representing the workers announced it had reached a tentative deal that requires the hotel to take over operations of a cafe, a bar and staff kitchen from a contractor and rehire some of the laid-off employees.

The deal is part of a broader agreement between the hotel and the union, Unite Here Local 11, that covers about 60 housekeepers, front desk workers and engineers, said Unite Here Local 11 spokesperson Maria Hernandez. If approved by the workers, the deal would put an end to intermittent work stoppages that have roiled the hotel for more than a year.

Under the agreement, non-tipped workers would see higher wages, including an immediate $5-per-hour wage boost, as well as other benefits. The union reached a similar tentative agreement this week with the Glendale Hilton.

For more than a year, Unite Here Local 11 has led a strike that initially involved about 60 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange counties, where contracts covering more than 15,000 workers expired in June of last year. All but a few had eventually agreed to new contracts, but Hotel Figueroa and a handful of others held out.

Rahim Ladha, a spokesperson for private equity firm BentallGreenOak, or BGO, which owns Hotel Figueroa, confirmed the firm as well as the hotel’s operator, Highgate Hotels, had agreed to the deal, but declined to provide other comment.

As the union continues to try to hash out agreements with the remaining hotels, one of Unite Here’s three presidents, Kurt Petersen, said the union is determined to extract greater concessions from the holdouts. “If you fight, you pay more. That’s our mantra. Everyone who has decided to lengthen this fight, they need to pay a bit of a tax.”

Nohelia Gonzalez, who has worked as a housekeeper at the hotel for three years, said the contract campaign has been difficult for her and other workers. On a typical morning, she wakes up at 3:40 a.m. to make the three-hour commute on public transportation from the San Fernando Valley to get to the hotel before her 8 a.m. shift. But during the strike, she would wake up even earlier to make it to 7 a.m. picket lines.

Gonzalez, 54, was on the picket line in January when several of her co-workers were bruised by small metal balls fired by some sort of air rifle.

“It’s been really tough, we’ve had horrible experiences,” Gonzalez said. “It was a long, hard-fought battle. [The agreement] means the world to so many of us.”

It was not clear exactly how many laid-off food and beverage workers would be hired back. Sparrow Italia and La Casita at Driftwood, two other dining establishments at the famed hotel that were shuttered in February, were not included in the agreement and remain closed.

Recalled employees who choose to come back to work at Café Fig, Bar Magnolia and the cafeteria for workers will be folded into the already existing bargaining unit of Hotel Figueroa workers, but their terms of employment will need to be separately negotiated, said Hernandez, the union spokesperson.

Tensions among restaurant workers at Hotel Figueroa flared soon after hospitality group Noble 33 took over food and beverage operations for the hotel in 2021, according to workers and union organizers. Workers said they were forced to take on multiple jobs without more pay as their colleagues left and management didn’t back-fill positions.

In December, back-of-house food and beverage workers for Noble 33 notified their management that they intended to form a union and submitted the necessary paperwork to do so. Days later, Noble 33 announced it was shuttering all food and drink services at the hotel.

Noble 33 followed through on the closures and laid off an estimated 100 employees in February.

Soon after, the hotel brought in a new third-party management company to take over food and beverage services. Unite Here Local 11 filed a complaint with the Los Angeles city attorney’s office alleging the hotel and the new food operator had violated the city’s “right to return” law that requires new hotel owners or new operators to keep the site’s employees during a transitional period.

Hotel Figueroa at the time denied the premise of the workers’ complaint, stating that it was acting in accordance with worker retention laws.