California North Coast legislators signal support for back-to-work bonuses as hotels, restaurants struggle to find workers

Two prominent North Coast lawmakers are backing any idea to help the hospitality industry — first hard hit by COVID and now, more recently, struggling to get workers to return to work so it can take advantage other people becoming tourists again.

State Sens. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Bill Dodd, D-Napa, both said paying a bonus to workers who return to work is worth consideration. McGuire told The Press Democrat that state lawmakers, who are mulling over how to spend part of the outsized state budget surplus to revive the ravaged economy, already are looking at it. Dodd said he plans to “advance” the matter to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office.

Whether the federal government’s $300 weekly supplement unemployment payment, in tandem with state benefits, is dissuading workers from going to work is hotly debated. Governors in other states have already said they plan to stop the payments starting as soon as next month.

But Robert Eyler, a Sonoma State University economist who tracks the North Bay labor markets, told The Press Democrat that a financial inducement to lure people back to work “a gimmicky fix.”

“Anecdotes suggest that there are people making choices based on the continuation of unemployment benefits and that the labor market is not changing enough yet to make that choice to walk away from them,” Eyler said.

Dodd told the newspaper that measures to refill these positions is “a balancing act.”

”We don’t put people in jeopardy who deserve these benefits because their jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon,” he said.

McGuire said he “would not support” California’s joining 20-plus other states in soon ending the temporary increase in unemployment benefits. The state’s residents who are earning the lowest wages have “taken the brunt of the pandemic,” the senator said, adding that those struggling before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last spring now have “more acute” financial troubles.

North Bay hospitality businesses are scrambling to fill positions now needed as pandemic restrictions have been easing in recent months. Several told the Journal last month that they were upping hourly wages, using contract labor and offering referral bonuses to re-staff and keep up with increasing demand.

Now hospitality workers who were furloughed 14 months ago are getting help from Sacramento.

Hundreds of thousands of California workers, including many in the North Bay, are hoping they will benefit from the passage of a hospitality rehiring bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month. This is a great relief, employees say, for them to continue contributing to the state’s economic recovery.

Senate Bill 93 guarantees the right to return to work for approximately 700,000 workers such as housekeepers, cooks, waiters, and bartenders, especially as the state targets June 15 for a full reopening.

As part of the collaborative reporting project California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California, CalMatters reported that under California’s new law, hotel industry employers must first offer jobs to their employees who were laid off due to the pandemic within a five-day period. From that point on, employees have an additional five days to accept or reject employment.

Fourteen months after the pandemic began, 80% of hotel workers remain unemployed, said Ada Briceño, co-president of the UNITE HERE Local 11 union.

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CalMatters reported the details of the SB 93 law requiring laid off hospitality industry workers to be rehired. The Press Democrat reported support for the idea of offering bonuses to workers who agree to return to work.