Gabriela Ochoa is a vivacious woman who buses tables at the Landings Restaurant at the Holiday Inn near Los Angeles International Airport, a job she has held since 2001.
This year has been a good year for Ochoa, 45, and her husband, who is a supervisor at a vegetable packing company. They have two adult children, a teenager and 6-year-old twins, and they can afford to give the twins treats. “I can take them to IHOP or to the aquarium,” she said. She hadn’t seen her family in Mexico for years, but this summer Ochoa, her husband and the twins took a two-week vacation to Michoacán to visit them.
She can get herself a new pair of sneakers without worrying about the money. The family owns its house. “My older children joke that they didn’t have what the kids have now,” she said. “Now the twins have more food in the fridge, a gallon of milk instead of a small carton, more toys. I take them to Chuck E. Cheese.”
Ochoa can do these things because in 2006, the City Council passed a law mandating a $10.64 hourly wage and health benefits for hotel workers on Century Boulevard, the corridor of 13 large hotels just outside the entrance to LAX. After legal squabbles, it went into effect in 2008.
[For more of this story, written by Tina Rosenberg, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...-show-signs-of-life/]
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