Transcript: Mayor Adams, DCWP Celebrate Efforts to Protect Hotel Workers and Guests, Bolster Tourism Industry

July 24, 2025

Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga, Department of Consumer and Worker Protection: All right, good morning, everyone. I am Vilda Vera Mayuga, commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Thank you so much for being here today. Visitors flock to our city to enjoy all we have to offer, from food to culture. And as the folks behind me here know, it is crucial we do all that we can to ensure they have a safe and comfortable stay.

Tourism is a vital part of our economy, and we're committed to supporting our city's hotel industry. But none of this would be possible without the hard work of thousands of hotel workers. Earlier this year, more than 600 hotels in our city were required to apply for a license to operate and implement enhanced protections for both guests and workers.

I want to thank HTC President Rich Maroko for their advocacy in supporting their workers. Councilmember Julie Menin for sharing our commitment to ensuring that our city's guests and hotel staff are safe. And now I will turn it over to Mayor Adams.

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you. Thank you so much. What are you guys, you guys are tourists visiting? From where? All over?

Audience: [Inaudible.]

Mayor Adams: All over. Okay, make sure you stay in a good hotel and spend a lot of money, okay? It's such an important piece of legislation. I want to just really thank Rich and HTC and all of our partners to make sure that our hotel workers and guests have a safe environment. And this is what, when we came into office, you think about crime was skyrocketing. You saw the level of guns that were on our street.

And now we're seeing the lowest numbers of shootings and homicide in recorded history of the city. And we're seeing all of our small businesses are now growing. Highest number of small businesses, highest numbers of businesses. And this is a direct result of public safety. Keeping people safe means a lot. And our administration, we have focused on that in every area of dealing with how people are safe. It doesn't matter if it's closing illegal smoke shops or if it's removing guns off the streets of the City of New York.

All those dangerous, pesky mopeds and two wheelers that we see move around. And so when you think about safety, rarely do people think about those who are employed in our hotel industry. And that's why the Safe Hotels Act was so significant. And I remember speaking with the president Maroko earlier when he was talking about it. It was clearly one of the most significant and important pieces of legislation because he heard it from his members all the time.

We've witnessed some of the high profile cases of hotel workers that were assaulted, hotel workers that were unfairly treated. And we knew we had to do something about it because public safety does not stop at the lobby of a hotel. It continues into every room, every wall room, every hall, every corridor. And that's what this bill is about. It's about hotel front desk staff at all hotels and security guards at large.

We're training employees on signs of human trafficking and giving out panic buttons. We're going to make sure guest rooms are clean every day. And we're going to protect hotel workers who have been retaliated against. These are significant parts of this legislation. And our hotels, as I stated, must be clean, safe, and dignified for tourists and workers alike.

This legislation will help make sure that it is the case and will continue to be the case. Public safety, as I stated, will always be the prerequisite to our prosperity. And nothing plays out more than our large number of hotel rooms. We witnessed a major recovery in our hotels post-pandemic. People thought it was going to take us five years to turn it around, but just the opposite.

Tourists are back. Broadway has had its finest 12 months in recorded history. We're seeing tourist dollars flooding to our city, 65 million tourists last year. And our hotels were there for us as well as we did with the migrants and asylum seeker crisis. Rich and HTC played a major role in assisting us through that crisis.

And now that we look at 90 percent of those who came into our care have taken the next step on the journey. Now we're seeing our hotels fill up again with tourists. And just a job well done, such an important bill, a real milestone for our city, the City Council, the union, as well as all those who were involved. I just want to say thank you that we got it done. And this is a real signature issue for this union. I want to turn it over now to the president of the union, Rich Maroko.

President Rich Maroko, Hotels and Gaming Workers Union, AFL-CIO: Good morning. So we are incredibly proud to be here today to celebrate and commemorate the implementation of the Safe Hotels Act. That statute is without question the most significant regulatory law regarding hotels that has been passed in our city's entire history. As a matter of fact, before the enactment of the Safe Hotels Act, there was really no meaningful regulation of hotels whatsoever, which is incredible when you think about how important that industry is to the city. Right?

The hospitality sector brings in tens of billions of dollars of revenue every year. Tens of millions of visitors from across the world, like we just saw, come to our city and stay in our hotels every year. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers work hard every day to staff those hotels. And tens of thousands more live in the neighborhoods of these hotels and are affected by the way they operate.

And without smart, common sense regulations, any industry, but certainly an industry as big as and as important as the hospitality industry, can have significant detrimental effects on our city. The Safe Hotels Act changes that. It makes the hospitality industry better. It makes it safer for guests, for workers and for the communities.

Now, obviously, from our union's perspective, our number one priority is ensuring that workers are safe on the job and that they're treated fairly. And this act has a host of protections for hotel workers that show that this city and this government value hospitality workers, that they recognize that they are the backbone of this very important economic engine.

But the law also protects guests and ensures that they are both safe and that their stays are clean and sanitary by imposing minimum staffing and cleanliness standards. And look, a good hotel that provides good service to its guests makes the entire industry stronger. And that benefits all of us.

And finally, this bill makes it safer for the neighborhoods that house hotels by purging that criminal element that can take root in hotels and spread to the surrounding neighborhoods. And while regulating the hotel industry may have been innovative, may even be groundbreaking in the city, I think the goals of making the industry safer and better are fairly modest and uncontroversial.

But getting this law passed was not easy because certain moneyed interests spent millions of dollars trying to kill it. They hired PR agents to smear the names of the proponents. They threatened to spend millions more campaigning against those that supported the act. They ran an all out anti-union, anti-worker, anti-consumer campaign. And they failed. And they failed spectacularly.

Because our city can't be bought. It can't be bullied. New Yorkers are really good at telling people like that exactly where they can go and what they can do to themselves. And that's exactly what they did here. And because of that, we now have regulations that are going to ensure that this giant industry that employs so many people, that affects so many people's lives is safe and clean for everyone involved.

And for that, I want to thank a lot of people. And I'm going to start with DCWP and Commissioner Mayuga for working really hard on implementing regulations. And they've been working hard now and they will be for years to come, I'm sure, ensuring that hotels comply with all the requirements of the act.

I'd like to thank the City Council and in particular the bill sponsor, Julie Menin and Speaker Adams, for passing this groundbreaking bill. And most of all, I would like to thank Mayor Adams, who has not only been a real friend and ally for hotel workers, but was instrumental in passing this law and will be instrumental to ensure that it is put into effect and complied with to the benefit of all New Yorkers. So thank you everyone, and congratulations. Thank you.

###