> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Vivian Rothstein: Fighting for ‘what’s right’ in SM - URL: https://www.smdp.com/vivian-rothstein-fighting-for-whats-right-in-sm/ - Published: 2004-02-16T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T03:48:28.000Z - Author: Carolyn Sackariason - Tags: Community, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homeless Vivian Rothstein has seen a lot of injustices throughout her life. The California native has been a driving force behind the living wage movement in Santa Monica for the past seven years and has long been an activist for human rights. The daughter of German immigrants, Rothstein has spent most of her life fighting for a better one for all walks of life — African Americans, Native Americans, women, renters, the homeless, the poor and low-wage workers. She grew up in a Los Angeles community made up almost entirely of Nazi Germany refugees and came of age in a time when activism was alive and well — the ’60s. Rothstein has traveled the country in search of getting people the treatment she believes they deserve. The experiences of her father, a window decorator, and her mother, a rent-control activist, might have been the starting point in shaping her political and philosophical views. Most of her family died in the Holocaust, and it wasn’t until recently that she realized how much impact it’s had on her. Rothstein is the deputy director of LA Alliance for New Economy, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving conditions for low wage workers. She also heads Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism, a project of LANE. After years of failed attempts to pass a living wage in Santa Monica, Rothstein went before the City Council last month to introduce a new proposal that if passed would entitle all city workers and employees employed by private companies on contracts with City Hall of $25,000 or more to earn a minimum of $11.51 an hour and receive upgraded health benefits. For nearly five years, SMART has pushed for a living wage — most recently $12.25 an hour without benefits — targeted largely toward workers in the tourism industry. The current proposal isn’t designed to meet that goal, but it’s just the beginning of a larger effort to get a a higher wage for the 3,500 low-wage workers in Santa Monica. The battle over the living wage began in 1999, when SMART first recommended to the City Council that tourism workers be paid a higher wage. Hoping to find a different solution, hotel and tourism groups in 2000 put Proposition KK on the ballot. But many argued that measure did too little to promote wages and more to protect businesses against future wage increases. KK was overwhelmingly defeated at the polls, 79 percent to 21 percent. Half a year later, the City Council approved SMART’s living wage, but the issue was forced to the ballot by opponents, who gathered thousands of signatures against it. In November of 2002, Proposition JJ failed by a mere 1.7 percent. It would have guaranteed workers at businesses near the beach that gross more than $5 million a year a wage of $12.25 an hour without health benefits or $10.50 with benefits. The law didn’t apply to unionized businesses. This gave the large companies an incentive to organize their labor. And throughout all of it, Rothstein — who is partly paid by the Hotel Employee and Restaurant Employees Union — has been the target of much criticism by her opposition — big business, the tourism industry and the chamber of commerce. She is steadfast in promoting workers’ rights issues and defending her stance, which some describe as rigid and non-compromising. It’s something Rothstein is unapologetic about because she believes the other side can be just as inflexible — they just have different philosophies on workers’ rights and compromise seems unlikely. She recently sat down with the Daily Press to discuss where she’s been and where she’s headed. How did you get involved in the living wage movement? “My parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. They lost most of their families during the war. I think from their experience, I’ve become very conscious of how minorities get treated in society and how that could affect me. In Germany, people couldn’t believe it was happening and slowly but surely, their rights were being taken away until they had absolutely nothing left. I grew up in Los Angeles in a community who were mostly refugees. I didn’t think for years that had any impact on me. It wasn’t until six or seven years ago that I suddenly realized why I feel the way I do.” Have you been involved in activism before? 3D6,“I went to Berkeley and studied psychology. Berkeley was a big place, and you look for a community, and I found one there. I got involved in the civil rights movement in San Francisco and Berkeley in 1964\. There were demonstrations for African Americans to give them access to jobs in the auto industry and the hotel industry. I was also drawn there because of the people in it, and because they were the most interesting and humane. At the time, if you were really committed and you wanted to develop skills as an organizer you went south.” Where did you go? “I went to Leake County, Mississippi. It was a little rural town, and I worked on voter registration and school integration. I was in a place called ‘Red Dog Road.’ The South at the time, the paving stopped when the black community started. This was a dirt road, and there was nothing in that community. We went door to door to see if there were people interested in getting their children integrated into the schools.” 44E, What did you learn from that experience? “I learned that ordinary people have a lot of wisdom about what they need and they have extraordinary leadership abilities. An organizer is someone whose job it is to provide those opportunities to get that leadership and recognition. I was down there for three and a half months. The whites were then admonished to go back to the north and start organizing in our own communities. So I went to Chicago to work on a community organizing project, and I was there for 10 years.” What was that project? “It was called ‘Jobs For Income Now.’ It was a community organization in a very poor area of Chicago that had a Native American population from West Virginia and Kentucky who couldn’t get jobs, as well as an African American population. We worked on welfare rights and housing rights. We tried to get stop signs and street lights in their communities. We were trying to build a power base for poor people in Chicago. At that time, poor people having any equal power was very difficult. These people were barely surviving. The police actually shut us down.” So you are no stranger to opposition? “No. The police force was pretty civilized compared to here.” Where did you go from there? “My husband at the time got a job with the union, and we went to Denver for four years and then to North Carolina. And then I came back here.” What drew you to Santa Monica? “I moved here in 1982\. I always wanted to come back to California. For one thing, it’s physically beautiful, and it’s one of the most interesting cities in the entire country. I’ve never really liked all that Eastern snobbism. I have two kids and really wanted to raise them in Southern California. And my mother was here. She was an activist in the rent-control movement in Santa Monica. There is something about the culture here. You can be who you want to be in California. You can reinvent yourself, and it feels less rigid. The Midwest has great things about it, but it’s rigid.” What did you do when you got here? 3AE,“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do here. The liberal majority on the City Council had just hired a city manager, and I knew some of the people on the council. They were looking for a community liaison for the city... someone who could work with community groups in the city for policy making. I got that job and did it for five years. I had never worked for a government before.” How was that experience, working on the opposite side? “It was really interesting. I think for a lot of people who were involved in the city at the time, it was a sort of change to figure out how to do things differently. You can’t ignore minority views. Santa Monica became much more open and transparent. We had all kinds of community groups that had interest and participation. They reviewed the Latino programs and figured out how the city could be more responsive to Latinos. There was the homeless task force that I worked on, mulling over city policy.” What were the politics like at that time and how involved was your mother? “She was very involved. She was one of the first to be involved on the Commission on Older Americans. She was one the first seniors affected by Prop. 13, promoted by landlords because it would relieve them of the rent-control tax burden. After Prop. 13 was passed, they started to evict people because property values were going up and they wanted to raise rents. It was really the seniors that propelled the rent-control movement, and my mother was one of the first seniors that they tried to evict. “I worked a lot on the homeless issue. That was really starting to become a big issue. I worked with a coalition that worked with the Ocean Park Community Center, which was a real visionary nonprofit group. I really loved the organization because of how creative it was and how humane it was. In 1987, a job came up, and I was really more comfortable working in the nonprofit sector. I wanted to learn how to run something, like an organization. At the time, there was an election, and it was really politically volatile. It was really hard to affect any change.” What else was happening in Santa Monica then? “Development was a huge issue. The city had negotiated a number of development agreements with large developers. It was really looking at the whole development arena in Santa Monica to redefine what kind of development the city wanted. The city was trying to figure out how to create a tax base and part of that discussion was, ‘do we continue to go with the development of commercial building or do we start promoting the tourism industry?’ The tourism industry revenues go directly to the city through the bed tax whereas the commercial development, the property tax goes to the state. It was a very long discussion and debate, and it was decided to promote the development tourism industry because Santa Monica has unique attributes, and because it had less negative impacts in terms of traffic flows and the revenue went directly to the city. We never thought about the people who work in the industry. So we all promoted this tourism idea. The convention and visitors bureau was funded, the city zoning was changed to encourage development by the ocean.” When did you get involved in the living wage movement? “When I was at the community center and I was working with the homeless people, there were a lot of people who had gotten laid off. They were on the streets, they were very depressed. We would provide emergency services, shelter, job preparation skills and counseling. And all they could get were minimum wage jobs with no benefits. The living wage was not going up commensurate with the cost of living. And people kept coming back to our shelters. They just could not get a leg up. They couldn’t save enough money for a security deposit. They kept dropping out of society. They couldn’t get back to some kind of economic stability. So I felt like it was the economy, it was the market. That’s when I got really intrigued with the living wage movement.” When was that? “1997\. I couldn’t really become publicly involved until I left OPCC. The first thing was the Miramar. It was the only hotel with a union in town, and the company was trying to get rid of the union. We were introduced to the hotel workers, and we got to know them. People had worked there for 20 years and had the same wage. The company was trying to intimidate them to give up their union. We weren’t even thinking about a living wage at the time. But we were just shocked that there were these horrible conditions in these hotels that we had all pushed to promote. The tourism industry was going to be a ‘save Santa Monica.’ This was our brilliant strategy, and it was just humiliating and upsetting to realize what conditions were like. How could we have been so ignorant?” Why haven’t you given up? 737,“I think a lot of us feel responsible for the conditions in the tourism industry because it was the strategy we promoted. A lot of hotels think they got there because they’re smart, but it was the whole plan and our vision. A lot of them got subsidies and breaks to develop here. “If I didn’t think we had the Santa Monica residents on our side, I would think it was hopeless. But people believe in this. The only way the other side has won is by tricking people. They have never won on the merits of their arguments. I feel like we owe it to the Santa Monica voting population to keep going forward. Wages have gone up in the industry since we started organizing.” What do you think has been the high point in the living wage movement here? “Visibility to the hotel workers. The people that do the work and make the tourism industry work. When we did polling, we found that people in Santa Monica really care about hotel workers. They respect what they think. They think they are the best judge of what’s good for them. Before, they were a completely invisible population. That identification people have with low wage workers is really an accomplishment.” The movement has been criticized that this is nothing more than an attempt to unionize the luxury hotels. What’s your response? “My view of it is we wanted to increase wages and benefits for hotel workers in Santa Monica. It would be great if it could be done with collective bargaining where workers are actually at the table, but if it can’t be done by collective bargaining, it can be done by ordinance. Whatever way it happens. The other side tried to paint us as pro-union, and none of us pretended that we weren’t. We told residents, and people don’t dislike unions in Santa Monica. And now with the supermarket strike, people have a better idea of what unions are fighting for.” Where do you shop? “Bob’s Market and Trader Joes.” What else do you do besides fight for a living wage? “I take yoga, garden, write. Non fiction, memoirs.” What went wrong with JJ and what lessons have you learned for the next campaign? “One mistake we made was didn’t have much money for a direct mail campaign. We did four pieces of mail. We should have really used more mail. We also didn’t expect the opposition to be so strong. They have spent $2.3 million in the past 3 1/2 years. Who would have thought? It is still so shocking.” What’s the plan for the future? “We are going to have a retreat very soon so we can really talk about what the rest of our proposal is. We need to work out the details. We’ve studied the tactics of the opposition, the economic data and we are working to refine our proposal. It’s important for the city to go on record for its own employees and contractors.” Employment: LANE, deputy director. Lead organizer for SMART, a group of community members and clergy and a project of LANE. Age: 57 Residence: Sunset Park Family: Life partner, Marc Haefeley, a journalist for the LA Alternative Press and KPCC. Son, Jesse, 29, teaches labor economics at Princeton University; daughter, Leah, 27, an union organizer working on a campaign for low wage industry workers in Oakland, Calif. Salary: Declined to give. Health benefits received from Hotels Employee and Restaurant Employee Union. *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 16, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/021604.pdf?ref=smdp.com)