Judge Upholds Seattle's Hotel Worker Law
King County Superior Court Judge John Erlick issued a ruling Friday that entirely upholds and affirms the Seattle Hotel Employees Health and Safety Initiative, a new law that Seattle voters approved in November. Initiative 124 was designed to protect hotel workers against workplace injury and sexual harassment, and includes other provisions such as a health care stipend for low-income workers and job protection if a hotel is sold to a new owner.
In December, a trio of hospitality industry associations, incuding the Seattle Hotel Association, sued the city over the law. During a late-March hearing on the case, attorneys for the plaintiffs argued against it for two main reasons. One: It misled voters by carrying too many disparate pieces of legislation under one roof. Two: It established what hotel-industry plaintiffs are calling a “blacklist” by requiring hotels to keep ongoing lists of guests whom their workers accuse of sexual harassment or assault. This so-called blacklist unequivocally violates the due process and privacy rights of hotel guests, the plantiffs argued.
If Judge Erlick had agreed with them, that part of the law could have been severed, with the rest of the law remaining intact. But on Friday, he ruled that the hotel associations do not have legal standing to file suit on behalf of a potential violation of a hotel guest’s due process or privacy rights because, among other reasons, there are no guests so far who have been so damaged. “Without knowing how many, if any, guests will be on this list or even how many potential guests will be excluded from Seattle hotels each year, the threatened injury is not immediate, concrete, or specific enough to satisfy this prong” of the complaint, he wrote.
Erlick also ruled that the law does not violate the Seattle City Charter’s “single-subject rule” for ballot initiatives because “all of the provisions are rationally related to the single subject of health, safety, and labor conditions for hotel employees.”
Read more: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/judge-upholds-seattles-hotel-worker-law/
