Petaluma council eyes protections for hotel workers laid off during coronavirus pandemic

Hotel workers who were laid off as the pandemic decimated tourism and hospitality sectors are urging Petaluma leaders to help them get their jobs back.

Slated to go before Petaluma City Council on Monday night, the hotel worker recall ordinance will likely mirror worker protections passed in Oakland and San Francisco, where employers seeking to bolster staffing are required to give laid-off workers the opportunity to reclaim lost positions.

The proposed ordinance, which hasn’t yet been published, has been touted primarily by a handful of laid-off Petaluma Sheraton Hotel workers, their union and North Bay Jobs with Justice organizers.

Councilmember D’Lynda Fischer said this week that she and Mayor Teresa Barrett have been aware of the issue for a few months, and that she has talked with advocates about the proposal.

“As hotels open back up, they want to be sure that instead of hiring new workers that have never worked at those hotels before, that they give priorities to those who lost their jobs,” Fischer said. “I think it’s pretty straightforward, I think it’s going to be fairly concise; bring back those people they had before, give them priority.”

Rumblings from laid-off Sheraton Hotel workers – the city’s only unionized hotel – have been growing for a while, cresting in late February when several workers and Unite Here union members called in to a city council meeting to urge leaders to enact protections citywide.

City leaders at the time confirmed they were looking into the issue, which could impact hundreds citywide and thousands in Sonoma County, where one in 10 residents find work in the county’s tourism and hospitality industry.

In February, the $2.3 billion economic sector, which laid nearly one-third of its workforce at the height of the pandemic, still employed 10,000 fewer workers than it did at the same time last year.

George Canseco was laid off last year after more than three years with the Sheraton Hotel. He joined a handful of others in asking city council during the Feb. 22 council meeting to implement the right to recall ordinance.

“It’s been hard for me because I need to help my parents with the income, and I built many great relationships with the workers there,” he said at the meeting. “I’d just love to come back, so if you guys could put a step in and help us get our jobs back, it would help out a lot.”

Tatiana Lam, the lead union organizer and Sonoma County representative for Unite Here, said the Petaluma proposal is just the latest in a growing number of worker recall ordinances across the state, some of which Lam’s union has steadfastly promoted.

“In Petaluma, these workers got laid off and we’re trying to have the city enact this law. It’s what we did in Oakland, and we want it to affect other hotels in the city as well, not just union,” Lam said. “Our industry, hotels and hospitality, has been the most damaged by COVID.”

Dianne Kenney, 65, spent more than 16 years working at Petaluma’s Sheraton Hotel. Over time, she says her job as a banquet server at the hotel became like a second home, and coworkers she worked alongside felt like family.

She loved the work, she said, and always intended to stay there until she was ready to retire.

But a few months after the county went into lockdown last spring, Kenney said she and several of her coworkers discovered they no longer had a job, joining a flood of hospitality workers who saw their industry pummeled by pandemic-induced restrictions.

“When they do need us, I want to be able to get my job back,” Kenney said in a phone interview. “That’s why we’re trying to get city council to enact that bill.”

The California Hotel and Lodging Association, the industry’s leading trade association in the state, has come out strongly against the recall ordinances, which have been passed in more than a half-dozen cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pasadena and Glendale.

Lynn Mohrfeld, the association’s president and CEO, sees the ordinances as unnecessary because he argues most hotels would choose to rehire employees with experience or familiarity with the company as a way to avoid additional training needs.

He also opposes giving workers a five-day window to respond to recall job offers, a common requirement in the new rules.

“The biggest risk to this for Petaluma is if Petaluma has an emergency and they need to house residents or anyone else in a hotel,” he said, acknowledging that Petaluma’s proposed ordinance is not yet published. “At that point, we wouldn’t be able to staff them up in time. That’s been our biggest concern, and I’ve raised that in other municipalities and at the state level.”

Kenney, the 16-year Sheraton employee and Cotati resident, says she’s in a privileged position compared to some coworkers given her years of experience. She also doesn’t depend on the income.

But she says many of her coworkers are concerned about whether they’ll be able to go back to work once restrictions are eased and hotels look to backfill their vacancies.

“A lot of others were dependent on that work,” she said. “They may be getting unemployment now, but they should have the choice to come back or not.”

(Contact Kathryn Palmer at kathryn.palmer@arguscourier.com, on Twitter @KathrynPlmr.)