Under an ordinance providing that certain hotels’ service charges must be paid to hotel workers “equitably and according to the services that are or appear to be related to the description of the amounts given by the hotel to the customers,” and defining “hotel worker” to mean any individual whose primary place of employment is a hotel, who is employed directly by the hotel or by a person who “has contracted with the Hotel Employer to provide services,” and who “performs a service for which the Hotel Employer imposes a Service Charge,” the term “hotel workers” did not include audio-visual technicians who worked at hotel banquet events, even if the hotels collected from customers a separately designated “service charge” that customers might reasonably believe was for the technicians’ services. Although the lead plaintiff offered to amend his complaint to allege that audio-visual technicians “receive a gratuity for each banquet event at a hotel,” that allegation still would not be sufficient to overcome the employer’s demurrer. The provision of the ordinance governing payment of service fees to hotel workers contained a list of specific instructions for distributing the fees to workers “who actually work the banquet or catered meeting” or who provide room service or porterage service. Although the ordinance’s list purported to be “Without limitation of the foregoing,” the principle of ejusdem generis required the Court of Appeal to interpret the list as a limitation on the ordinance’s definition of “hotel worker.” Hotel audio-visual technicians were unlike hotel workers who provided banquets, catered meetings, room service, and porterage service because audio-visual technicians were not workers “for which the payment of a gratuity constitutes part of their wages, and who would have been paid a gratuity by hotel customers but for the imposition of the service charge collected by the hotel for their services.” A broader interpretation of the term “hotel workers” would mean that customers’ bills could not include separately designated charges with names such as “plumbing service charge” because the proceeds would go directly to the plumbers rather than to the plumbing subcontractors.
