The Los Angeles hotel industry is shedding jobs at its steepest rate in a decade outside the pandemic, according to a new analysis of federal labor data, as local businesses struggle to stay afloat under some of the most aggressive minimum wage mandates in the country.
An analysis by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) of newly released U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures revealed that Los Angeles County’s hotel and motel sector lost 1.7% of its workforce in December 2025 compared to the same period the prior year. The contraction hit the market just as a string of hyper-localized wage mandates went into effect…