During the July 4 weekend, two seemingly unrelated events occurred: First, thousands of Black and brown hotel workers in Los Angeles represented by UNITE HERE Local 11 went out on a three-day strike; second, three Massachusetts-based civil rights organizations filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that Harvard College’s practice of giving preferential treatment to legacy applicants violates federal law, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because it disproportionately benefits the children of wealthy white parents.
The complaint implicitly adopts reasoning from Justice Ketanji Brown Jacksons’s dissent in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action, where she excoriates the court’s colorblind approach; in her words, “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
But this is just as true in college admissions as it is in the workplace.
The strike against Marriott International, Hyatt and Hilton Hotels & Resorts and others, took place after 96 percent of the union’s 15,000 members voted to authorize it, bringing national attention to their fight for workplace justice. The first wave of strikes targeted hotels in the downtown Los Angeles area. On July 10, thousands of workers launched a second wave of strikes against hotels surrounding the Los Angeles International Airport. And ten days later, the union mounted a third strike against hotels located in Hollywood and Pasadena.
The mostly Black and brown workers, many of whom are Latina women from immigrant communities, can no longer afford to live in the city where they cook meals, clean rooms and wash dishes for a living. According to the union, such hospitality workers “would need to earn $39.31 an hour to be able to pay rent on an average two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles and Long Beach.” This is consistent with a new federal report that found renters in California need to make $42.25 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental. Given the current $20 to $28 hourly pay ranges for these workers, the union’s demands are far from unreasonable: an immediate $5 hourly increase and two subsequent yearly increases of $3. (As of this writing, the union has reached a tentative agreement with its largest employer, the Westin Bonaventure).
For these hotel workers, home ownership in Los Angeles is not even an option, where the annual income needed to purchase a home rose last year to $220,000. Many have to drive an Uber or sleep in their cars during back-to-back work days, just to afford rent in the cities that border Los Angeles County. Because of the need to take on multiple jobs, work multiple shifts and drive extended commutes, they often are not able to spend time with their kids.
Irene Andrade, who has worked as a room attendant for the Sheraton Gateway Hotel for years, was priced out of the city, telling The Los Angeles Times, “I have a seven-year-old girl and I have to leave her. I hardly see her.” The conditions faced by workers like Andrade mean they cannot be there to help their children with homework, read them books or take them to soccer practice.
This is in contrast to the more privileged, rat-race-obsessed parents in the city who have the flexibility to shuttle their kids to-and-from horseback riding or private after-school tutoring. The fact that these parents have such time and resources to focus on their child’s academic and extracurricular resume illustrates the uneven playing field that eventually will affect college admissions.
What the Supreme Court’s colorblind view ignores is that access to those privileges have been shaped by race and enduring factors like the legacy of Jim Crow and our country’s broken immigration system. If there was an actual even playing field, the demographics of the hotel workers would be interchangeable with the executives in the corporate boardrooms who continue to resist their demands for a $5 wage increase. But the white men in those rooms have a vastly different life experience compared to the women of color who clean them.
If opponents of affirmative action, or those who continue to defend legacy admissions, truly believe in fixing larger structural and institutional problems, they need to start by supporting these hotel workers so that their children can have at least some of the myriad advantages enjoyed by wealthier white families.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.