Join CPI in supporting Mayor Filner’s call for an end to poverty wages at downtown hotels.
Please add your voice by writing a short note on why you think our hotels should provide a decent living for their employees and city officials should say NO to poverty wages. One or two sentences will do. (See below for facts you may want to reference.)
Use this form and CPI will send your letter to KPBS, San Diego City Beat, Voice of San Diego, San Diego Free Press and the UNION Tribune.
Need facts for your letter? Try these:
- San Diego’s hotel owners are threatening to sue the city to get $1 billion over the next four decades, but many don’t pay their employees enough to live on.
- Tourism is an $8 billion industry in San Diego, yet it pays a median of $24,400 a year for fulltime work. [Details available in our Poverty Report].
- A single adult needs to make about $28,000 to live self-sufficiently in San Diego County – or double that to support a family. [Read more in our “Making Ends Meet” report]
- Hotels are a big part of the tourism industry, which pays the lowest wages, on average, of all San Diego’s major industries. That’s part of the reason one in three families in the county lives in economic hardship.
- Many hotels often don’t offer healthcare for employees, or make it unaffordable. At Doubletree San Diego, housekeepers make only $8 an hour and have to pay $400 a month for family healthcare. There’s no excuse for such poverty jobs: the nearby Hilton San Diego Bayfront pays $15.50 an hour and provides full family healthcare for only $50 a month.
- Low-wage jobs without healthcare coverage depress the spending power of the community and raise costs for taxpayers as workers must depend on public aid programs.
- Hotels do well in San Diego. They need to do well by San Diego. If they expect to receive public funds, it’s only fair that hotel owners act responsibly and provide good-paying local jobs.
Please don’t delay or count on others to speak up. The hoteliers are pulling out the stops in their efforts to avoid paying decent wages. Let your voice be heard!
Related articles
- City Council to Discuss San Diego’s Tourism Marketing District (sandiego6.com)
- Bring About a Living Wage – Sign the Petition (peninsulademocrat.wordpress.com)
- Low Wages Equal Violence, Report Finds (progressillinois.com)
- Why Mayor Filner is Right to Stand Up to the Real Bullies (obrag.org)
POINT LOMA & OB DEMS 