By Will Jason

The Woodfin Suites Hotel and the city of Emeryville are set to make final arguments Jan 15 in a dispute over up to $220,000 in back wages that the city says Woodfin owes current and former hotel employees.

The dispute between Emeryville and Woodfin arises from a voter initiative, passed in 2005, that sets minimum wages and work conditions for employees of large hotels. Four Emeryville hotels were subject to the initiative, called Measure C, but Woodfin is the only one still challenging its enforcement.

At issue is a requirement that workers be paid overtime if they clean more than 5,000 square feet of hotel rooms per day. The city is asking Woodfin to pay more than a dozen workers who allegedly worked above that limit for a year after the measure went into effect.

In an interview, Woodfin employee Maria Martinez said she used to clean about 16 rooms per day, and that this number was eventually cut by almost half in 2007 because of Measure C. But she said it took the hotel more than a year to make that change, and that it owes her $12,000 in overtime for extra rooms she cleaned in 2006.

“The reality is that they owe us money and we want them to pay us,” Martinez said, referring to more than a dozen co-workers who are also allegedly owed back pay.

The hotel is appealing the demand for back wages, and is challenging the city’s formulas used to measure working conditions. It is arguing that housekeepers like Martinez receive help from other hotel employees, and that the city is not taking that into account when it measures their workload.

“You cannot say that there’s only one person who is cleaning a room at one time when you have a team of people that are cleaning the room,” said Woodfin spokesman Tim Rosales. “We think we’ve been in compliance with [Measure C] from the time it was enacted to now.”

The Emeryville City Council has been holding a multi-day hearing on Woodfin’s appeal since November. On Jan 5, the council heard testimony from current and former Woodfin employees called by the hotel to describe their working conditions.

Three workers, speaking through an interpreter, gave varying accounts of the way cleaning duties are split between housekeepers and other employees. They said they could not precisely define the amount of time they spend cleaning rooms, a question that is crucial to calculating the wages that would be owed.

“I can’t give a percentage,” said Maria Corona, who has cleaned rooms for Woodfin since 2007.

In an interview after the January hearing, Emeryville City Manager Patrick O’Keefe said that while his staff initially asked Woodfin to pay up to $220,000 in back wages, it didn’t know details about its housekeeping process and may now back off that number. He is frustrated that the city is being asked to become involved in the details of hotel houskeeping.  “I don’t think that is a very good use of the city’s time and resources,” O’Keefe said.

The hearing is scheduled to continue Jan 15 at 7 p.m., and the City Council is expected to start deliberations after hearing final arguments from city staff and the hotel.