Hotel Compliance Profiler

Which wage-and-hour laws apply to this hotel? The honest answer is that room count, city, and the calendar decide more than most operators expect: a 59-room Los Angeles property misses the hotel-worker minimum wage but still carries the housekeeping workload cap, and the same hotel's controlling floor jumps $2.50 on a single July morning. This profiler resolves every layer on file — wage floors and their next scheduled steps, ordinance coverage component by component, state premium rules, fair-workweek scheduling laws, and statewide recall and panic-button mandates — for one property on one date. Inputs never leave your browser.

How coverage thresholds work#

Hotel-worker ordinances rarely cover every hotel in town — they gate on guest-room counts, and the gates sit at different heights for different obligations, sometimes inside the same city:

• Los Angeles runs the hotel-worker minimum wage at 60+ rooms, but the Hotel Worker Protection Ordinance's housekeeping workload caps reach down to 45+ rooms — a 50-room property owes the workload premium without owing the hotel wage.
• Long Beach inverts the usual order: the hotel minimum wage applies only at 100+ rooms (Measure N as raised by Measure RW), while Measure WW's workload caps start at 50+ rooms.
• Seattle splits a single 2019 package: panic buttons and job retention cover hotels with 60+ rooms, but the healthcare expenditures and the 4,500 sq ft workload cap apply only at 100+ rooms.
• SeaTac uses a compound test — 100+ guest rooms AND 30+ workers — so a large hotel with a small direct workforce can fall outside Proposition 1 while its neighbor is covered.

And the gates move: Los Angeles started at 300+ rooms in 2015, dropped to 150+, and now sits at 60+. The profiler applies the thresholds on file as of the date you pick and shows its reasoning on every line.

The scheduling laws that do not cover hotels#

The fair-workweek section of the profile reports non-coverage explicitly instead of staying silent. Five famous predictive-scheduling laws never reach hotel operations: New York City's Fair Workweek Law covers fast food and retail only (Admin. Code §20-1201 et seq.); Seattle's Secure Scheduling Ordinance covers retail and food services (SMC ch. 14.22 — Seattle's hotel obligations travel in the separate Hotel Employee Protections package); San Francisco's Formula Retail Employee Rights Ordinances cover chain formula retail with 40+ locations worldwide (Police Code arts. 33F–33G); the Los Angeles Fair Work Week Ordinance covers NAICS 44–45 retail with 300+ employees globally (LAMC §185.00 et seq.); and Emeryville's Fair Workweek Ordinance covers retail and fast food (EMC ch. 5-39). Profile a hotel in one of those cities and the law appears with a "does not apply" badge and the verified reason — and where no scheduling law matches the location at all, the profiler says that explicitly rather than leaving the section blank.

What a CBA can and cannot waive#

Most of the California hotel ordinances — and Seattle's package — allow some obligations to be waived in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement, but only when the waiver is clear and unambiguous: a generic management-rights clause does not do it. The carve-outs differ ordinance by ordinance, and where the record verifies them, the profiler names them. West Hollywood (WHMC ch. 5.127) is the sharpest example: a CBA can waive the wage, leave, workload, recall, and retention provisions, but the panic-button and training requirements are not waivable at all — they stand even under a union contract. Where a record does not yet pin the per-component carve-outs, the profiler shows the verified waiver standard and tells you to confirm the rest against the ordinance text. Two things never move: the statewide recall right under Labor Code §2810.8 carries no CBA waiver in the record on file, and a CBA cannot waive the state minimum wage itself.

From coverage to dollars#

A coverage map is only half the question; the other half is what the coverage costs. Once the profile resolves, the tool prices each layer as a floor-anchored illustration for a single full-time worker on the as-of date: the health benefit payment as a per-hour cost on top of wages (rate × the hours it is owed on), one over-cap housekeeping day under the ordinance's own premium model, and a single clopening under whichever fair-workweek law actually covers the property. These are deliberately labeled illustrations of magnitude, not your payroll — they answer "is this a $25 problem or a $2,500 one?" so you know which layers deserve the auditors' exact math. The profiler also flags near-miss thresholds: a 58-room Los Angeles hotel sits two rooms under the 60-room wage gate, so a modest expansion would pull it into a wage floor it does not owe today — the kind of cliff a renovation or rebrand walks into unannounced.

What the profiler intentionally excludes#

• Tax and payroll mechanics — tip reporting, FICA credits, and withholding are a different discipline.
• Immigration and work-authorization compliance (I-9, visa programs for seasonal staff).
• Safety regimes beyond panic buttons — OSHA programs, heat-illness rules, and injury-prevention plans are out of scope; only the panic-button mandates that travel inside hotel-worker laws appear here.
• Exact payroll figures — the dollar lines are single-worker illustrations at the controlling floor, not a property-wide bill. For the real math on a real week, feed the resolved stack to the workweek auditor and the portfolio forecaster.

A worked example#

Background: the hotel ordinance map · joint employment & staffing agencies · predictive scheduling. Then audit a real workweek under the resolved stack with the workweek auditor. This tool is educational and illustrative — it reports what is in the verified records, not legal advice for your property; see the disclaimer.