If you’ve been awake at any time in the past six months then you’ve probably heard something about the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. Awareness of the tour came early to my house because I have two daughters who very much wanted to get tickets to one of the final shows at SOFI stadium in Los Angeles.
I wrote about the experience of trying to help get tickets here. You may have forgotten but the ticket sales for the tour became national news after Ticketmaster crashed and behaved sluggishly. After struggling with the site I was able to get tickets but an untold number of people missed out and many of them were angry about it.
Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.
Break them up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 15, 2022
Okay, I’m not sure AOC missed out. She could probably just get invited backstage at this point. In any case, it was a big story last November. The site defended itself saying it had been prepared for about 1.5 million people to log on and try to buy tickets. Instead they were hit with 14 million people logging on to buy tickets. They just badly underestimated how big this was going to be.
In any case, Swift has been touring the US since March and is now heading for the final shows of the US tour in Los Angeles. She sold out SOFI stadium, where the Rams and the Chargers play, for six nights. As far as I know that’s unprecedented as the stadium can hold around 70,000 people.
The first of six nights is tomorrow but now a bunch of California Democrats are urging Swift to postpone all of her dates in LA, which again have been sold out since last November, to show solidarity with striking hotel workers:
California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, a Democrat, and dozens of elected officials from across the state on Tuesday signed their names to a campaign organized by Unite Here Local 11 to put pressure on the music icon. Swift is scheduled to perform six sold-out shows at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, beginning Thursday and continuing through Aug. 9.
Kounalakis, who attended Swift’s Eras Tour in Santa Clara and is the first major candidate running for governor in 2026, said all workers deserve dignity and fair wages.
“I stand with Unite HERE in their fight for a living wage,” she told POLITICO in a prepared statement. “And I hope we can use this moment to bring attention to the hardworking men and women who are the engine of our economy.”
Did you catch the timing of all of that? Hotel workers’ contracts expired June 30 and a strike was approved at that point. Lt. Gov. Kounalakis waited until she’d attended the show near her before calling on Swift to postpone remaining dates. If she really believed in solidarity, why didn’t she call to postpone the show she herself attended last Friday?
Long story short I went to the Eras Tour ✨ pic.twitter.com/YplE7dgJIa
— Eleni Kounalakis (@EleniForCA) July 30, 2023
The Executive Director for the Employment Policies Institute wrote a piece for a local newspaper arguing Swift should ignore the unions’ demands.
…according to Local 11’s twisted logic, Swift is obligated to reschedule because her visiting fans will be staying at LA-area hotels, including some of the hotels where workers may currently be on strike. This selfish perspective is on-brand for Local 11, which in recent weeks has made news for deliberately disrupting a wedding and 4th of July tourism to advance its goals during the strike.
Set aside for a minute the flawed argument that the entire LA economy should suffer because of labor disputes at a handful of union properties. The fault for the ongoing strike lies with union leadership, not the hotels and certainly not the excited Taylor fans coming to Los Angeles. The union has stubbornly prolonged the dispute with demands that hotels support a Los Angeles ballot measure that would require them to house the homeless alongside paying guests.
With a potential transformation of these hotels into makeshift homeless shelters, good luck getting tourists to stay there for Taylor’s next tour stop in Los Angeles…
As of this writing, Swift seems poised to ignore the union’s unreasonable demands, picking the local economy and thousands of fans over the tantrums of Kurt Peterson and his cronies at Local 11. The tour dates will no doubt be a success, and should also serve as a lesson to other celebrities and politicians who face a Local 11 call for a boycott: There’s no harm in shaking off the unreasonable demands of Los Angeles labor unions.
Yes, the union really is trying to turn hotels into shelters for the homeless, I wrote about that here.
Anyway, I do have some skin in this game since my kids are attending these shows and I helped buy the tickets, but I sincerely hope Swift ignores these self-serving pleas and goes on as scheduled. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who’ve been looking forward to this and they are the ones paying for the expensive tickets, not the union.
Read the full article here