Long Beach Hotel Fined $4.8 Million for Failing to Rehire Staff Laid Off Due to COVID-19

People wearing protective face masks walk on the street in a file photo. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)

California labor officials have slapped a Long Beach hotel with a hefty $4.8 million fine for failing to comply with a state law that mandates timely job offers to employees laid off during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The California Labor Commissioner’s Office (LCO) announced on Oct. 17 that it had levied the fine against the Hyatt Regency Long Beach hotel for violating the state’s Right to Recall law (SB 93), following an investigation prompted by complaints from disaffected workers.

The LCO’s investigation, launched in September 2022, found that the Hyatt Regency Long Beach neglected to rehire 25 employees—including restaurant servers, bartenders, housepersons, turndown attendants, cashiers, and stewards—who were let go during the pandemic.

“Some of these employees had as much as 24 years of experience, and were suddenly out of work due to a public health emergency,” Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower said in a statement. “The employer failed to offer them their old jobs back in compliance with the law.”

The workers in question were laid off during the COVID-19 lockdowns but were not offered their previous positions when the hotel resumed operations, which the LCO says amounts to a violation of the Right to Recall law.

Enacted on April 16, 2021, the Right to Recall law mandates that employers in the hospitality and building services sectors must offer available job openings similar to those previously held by laid-off workers, based on seniority, once their businesses resume operations post-pandemic. This law has been extended until December 31, 2025.

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Hyatt Regency Long Beach is not the first entity to face consequences for violating the Right to Recall law. In July 2022, Terranea Resort reached a settlement with the LCO, agreeing to pay $1.52 million to affected workers for similar violations related to the worker retention law.

A spokesperson for Hyatt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lockdown-related layoffs were but one unintended consequence of a spate of pandemic policies that study after study has shown probably did more harm than good.

Lockdown Harms

Some studies have suggested that COVID-19 lockdowns worked to stem the spread of the virus.

“Our results show that major non-pharmaceutical interventions—and lockdowns in particular—have had a large effect on reducing transmission,” wrote the authors of a study backing restrictive measures, though the research did not evaluate any unintended impacts of the measures.

But a number of other studies have identified lockdowns as contributing to jumps in suicides, mental health crises, learning loss, and delayed health treatments.

One recent study, published on Oct. 9 in JAMA Pediatrics, found that more than half of U.S. adolescents with clinical depression missed their treatment during the first year of the pandemic as lockdowns kept them home.

An earlier study, published in August 2021 in JAMA Pediatrics, found that depression and anxiety in youth doubled in the first year of the pandemic.

In fact, nearly all indicators of poor mental health—which include unhealthy thinking patterns and suicidal thoughts—worsened significantly from 2011 to 2021, the CDC’s biennial report on its Youth Risk Behavior Survey said.

Recently published research on child gun deaths added heart-wrenching evidence suggesting lockdowns had a devastating impact on society. The study, published on Oct. 5 in a journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, found that injury-related deaths among children rose sharply during the pandemic years 2020-2021.

The spike in pediatric fatal injuries was driven by drugs and injuries involving firearms.

“Due to lockdowns and other misconceived pandemic policies, child gun deaths in the United States exploded exponentially in 2020,” wrote Kevin Bass, a researcher and PhD student in medicine, in a post on X, commenting on the study.

While the study shows that firearm-related homicides began rising in 2018, Mr. Bass said that it’s “very clear that the huge leap to record levels occurred between 2019 and 2020, which is when lockdowns happened.”

Lockdowns Claim 20 Times More Life Years Than They Save: Study

Another recent study looked at a wide array of research into lockdowns. It concluded that such measures can be an effective tool in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic but only if “long-term collateral damage is neglected.”

“The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save,” the study’s authors wrote.

They also said that what deserves a “special and urgent analysis” is the question of “to what extent, why, and how the dissenting (disapproved by healthcare officials) scientific opinions were suppressed during COVID-19.”

“Suppression of ’misleading' opinions causes not only grave consequences for scientists’ moral compass; it prevents the scientific community from correcting mistakes and jeopardizes (with a good reason) public trust in science,” they wrote.