City Councilwoman Julie Menin is close to lining up a veto-proof majority for a bill to cripple Gotham's hotel industry, and so slam tourism as New York still struggles to recover from the pandemic. Her obvious motive: lining up the support of the powerful hotel unions for her coming bid to become council speaker.
It [Safe Hotel Act] would require hotels to obtain operating licenses every year, ban them from contracting out critical services and require them to directly employ only unionized workers. Vijay Dandapani, president of the Hotel Association of New York City, likens it to a "nuclear bomb" that "will destroy a major segment of the industry."
The union can count on preventing any new non-unionized hotels, and nobody's interested in opening one that'll be under the HTC's thumb. Now the drive is to outlaw any nonunion job at any hotel, which guarantees at least some closures and sets up the HTC to dictate to the entire industry, forever.
Menin pretends it's an anti-crime measure, yet neither NYPD stats nor 911 complaints show any reason to fear hotel-centered crime. Indeed, any hotel that wants to stay in business is vigilant on that front. Yes, the Police Benevolent Association now backs the bill, but the obvious explanation is that the PBA and the HTC are both clients of the same lobbying shop.
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