Lawmakers block effort to seek hotel wage hike

STOMACH PAINS: Renaissance Providence Hotel employee Santa Brito protests the denial of the $15 minimum wage for hotel workers during a Statehouse rally. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
STOMACH PAINS: Renaissance Providence Hotel employee Santa Brito protests the denial of the $15 minimum wage for hotel workers during a Statehouse rally. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Earning a little more than $9 an hour as a front-desk clerk at the Hilton Providence, Evan McLaughlin last year lost an apartment in Providence because he couldn’t afford the rent.
McLaughlin temporarily moved into a crowded house until he could get a second job as a room-service server making $6.50 an hour. Now able to afford an apartment with a single roommate, he supported the Providence City Council’s decision to ask city voters in November to approve a $15 minimum wage for city hotel workers.
Lawmakers, however, blocked that effort earlier this month, adding a provision in the proposed $8.7 billion fiscal 2015 state budget that Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee signed into law last week. The spending plan now prohibits cities and towns from setting a minimum wage that differs from the statewide minimum wage.
Currently $8 an hour, the statewide minimum wage is set to increase to $9 an hour, effective in January, through a separate bill Chafee also said he intends to sign.
The dispute last week led to a brief hunger strike by some hotel workers (McLaughlin is not among them, though he helped coordinate it), while Chafee and various lawmakers continue to assert that no city or town should be allowed to unilaterally raise the minimum wage either for a municipality as a whole or for a select group.
“I don’t understand why we would have to pick winners and losers,” said state Rep. Antonio Giarrusso, R-East Greenwich, referring to the idea of bumping up the minimum wage for a narrow sector like hotel workers. “What’s the next thing? ‘I work at a shipyard’? ‘I fix cars’? Where do you draw the line? Have a better job market and the wages will set themselves. It’s simple economics.” Asked where he stood on the subject, Chafee in an email said, “Because of our uniqueness and size, sound economic policy … calls for a statewide minimum wage rather than a patchwork of wage thresholds.”
Despite the impending $1-an-hour raise, McLaughlin and his fellow hotel workers and supporters say it’s not enough.
“At the end of the week, I can barely make it [financially],” McLaughlin said. “I can cover my expenses, but I don’t save money.”
The Procaccianti Group owns three hotels in the city – the Hilton Providence, Renaissance Providence Downtown Hotel and Wyndham Garden Providence. Richard MacAdams, Procaccianti chief legal counsel, noted that generally, minimum-wage increases “potentially make it more difficult for the city to compete with other cities for convention and tourist business.”
After learning that the governor is supporting both a statewide minimum-wage hike and the ban on individual municipalities setting their own minimums, Unite Here! Local 217 said last week it was not planning a legal challenge. The labor organization has been seeking to organize hotel workers and helped circulate the petition for the proposed Providence referendum.
“What’s in the budget is within the bounds of the law,” said Jenna Karlin, vice president and Rhode Island director for Unite Here!
Jack Temple, policy analyst for the nonprofit National Employment Law Project, says there is ample precedent for municipal minimum wages that exceed the statewide figure, citing San Francisco and Long Beach, Calif. In 2012, Long Beach approved a $13.50 minimum wage for city hotel workers by placing the initiative on the ballot, he said. An initiative similar to Providence’s plan passed in November in Seattle, he added. However, the action in Seattle is reportedly being challenged in federal court. Providence City Councilor Carmen Castille, a housekeeper at the Omni Providence Hotel who supported bringing a minimum-wage hike for hotel workers to citywide referendum, said she earns $14.57 an hour, after 20 years of employment. She is satisfied with her pay, but knows of colleagues at other hotels that get paid less and may clean 24 rooms a day, while she and her Omni colleagues are only required to clean 15 rooms in a day.
Izzi said housekeepers at Procaccianti Group hotels clean on average 16 rooms, not 24.
Neither Michael A. Solomon, city council chairman, nor Mayor Angel Taveras immediately returned calls seeking comment on whether city officials would challenge the ban.
As for the four women participating in the hunger strike, they planned to continue until the budget was signed last week, as a show of support for their peers.
Santa Brito of Providence, who is Dominican, said through a translator that she works as a housekeeper at the Renaissance hotel. She’s been there almost three years and earns $10 an hour. Despite engaging in the hunger strike, she said she is “full of energy” because it’s important to her to fight for the cause of higher wages for herself and her colleagues.
“The necessities and the prices in Providence are too much, so I’m in this fight for myself and others because none of us can afford to live comfortably,” she said. “More than anything, I’m in this fight for my child. … With the wages I have now, I can’t afford to provide him with the life he deserves or the future he deserves.” •

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