Boston Globe Suggests That Foregoing Daily Housekeeping at a Hotel is Greenwashing

Yeah, you read that right.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/07/18/going-green-cutting-into-hotel-housekeepers-livelihoods/U21UsC2gJWDHPGsGWYfzAI/story.html

“The “green” initiatives ...”

“The Peoples [sic] Climate Movement ... has a word for it: greenwashing.”

The author, Katie Johnston, used to do travel and tourism reporting, and is now doing workforce issue coverage.

I’m okay with framing this as a “ compensation for hotel housekeeping has not kept pace with the impacts of green / environmental concerns paired with guests desiring greater privacy in their hotel rooms.”

I’m _not_ okay with scare quoting green, and implying that it isn’t actually environmentally beneficial to, say vacuum a room less frequently, or launder the towels after a single use or wtf.

Here’s how I would have presented the contract dispute: before daily housekeeping was deprecated in hotels, a typical shift for a housekeeper involved tidying (trash, toilet paper refill and make beds) n rooms and cleaning (vacuuming, scrubbing the combo and the toilet, changing the sheets, vacuuming the room, cleaning all surfaces including mirrors and tile) .2n rooms. Now, a typical shift for a housekeeper involves cleaning n rooms, and tidying .2n rooms. It’s way more, harder work, they are getting paid the same amount per hour, are expected to do the same total number of rooms in a shift, and they are getting fewer shifts a week.

Of course, union doesn’t want to make that argument, because _that_ is a piecework payment argument.

Arguably, there could have been a decrease in tip income as well, altho I question that — a lot of people tip only at end of stay, and a lot of people don’t ever tip hotel cleaners. It also isn’t mentioned in the article, because tip income is unlikely to be a component of a dispute with the hotel.

Regardless, I’m _so happy_ to say no to daily housekeeping (on the list of terrible memories from my first honeymoon are the relentless interruptions from cleaning staff. Really put me off B&Bs permanently), that I cannot imagine that this is a trend likely to reverse. Someone out there is going to complain, when we finish this transition, and lament the end of daily housekeeping and having to pay for it as an extra (actually, this is already the case at some of the places we stay, albeit they are not precisely hotels — DVC does not have daily housekeeping unless you pay extra for it). But that someone will not be me.

ETA: It won’t be my sister, either. Honestly, the major reason I clean my own house is because I fucking hate interruptions from having people in my house to do it for me. Clearly, there is something wrong with me.

ETAYA:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-green-hotels-1211-biz-20141210-story.html

2014 Article, another local in the same union, different city. The coverage focuses more where I would have put it (the difference between tidying and cleaning) and the reporter is much less committed to the perspective taken by the workers (that the fault lies with encouraging guests to decline daily housekeeping, vs. with management’s quotas being out of step with the resulting change in the work load).

Still More:

Unite Here union contracts are ending / up for renegotiation this summer.

http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2018/jul/19/marriott-workers-have-had-enough-demand-better-tre/

Much longer list of issues; nowhere does the anti-green rhetoric appear.

Vegas hotel / resorts (gaming industry) are highly unionized; Unite Here got good contracts there recently, and is looking to base their contracts in other cities on that model.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/marriott-other-hotel-deals-to-follow-vegas-pattern-union-says-1

I’m having trouble finding the actual language on automation, and believe me when I say, I’m interested. I’m happy to see more meaningful protection for workers from harassment (panic buttons and policies about guests who have engaged in it to not be allowed to stay / return).

A bit more about automation here, specifically, motorized carts for housekeeping. That seems like a really good idea.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/automation-race_us_5b20eb7ae4b0adfb826f9f48

Automation, order taker vs. runner split for beverages controversy:

https://vegasinc.lasvegassun.com/business/real-estate/2013/sep/20/atlantic-city-cocktail-waitress-warn-local-servers/

I found that one, when I was puzzled by the description of Eve Davis in this article:

https://www.casino.org/blog/casino-waitresses-protest-at-being-replaced-by-robots/amp/

27 years old? 2 boys in college? Nope. 27 years of experience. Big difference.

It _sounds_ like what used to be a single position — cocktail waitress — has been split in two, with an order taker who does a bunch of chatting, and a runner (formerly the cocktail waitress) delivering the drinks. The usual risks apply (tracking down the customer who the runner has never seen and wasted drinks when you fail) (tips going down because the interaction with the runner is drastically reduced) (potential for overserving, and lack of clarity on where the responsibility for overserving lies — historically, it was with the waitress who did it end to end. It probably _should_ be in the software, but a second choice would be with the order taker) and haven’t been addressed if the coverage is to be believed.

NYT coverage of the get rid of daily housekeeping coverage back in February:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/travel/skipping-hotel-housekeeping-perks.html

Upon Further Reflection, This May Be A Spaghetti Situation

I have been considering a bit more — after a ton of research and talking to two different people — the Boston Globe article in which the author scare quotes green, and calls hotels which incentivize declining daily housekeeping “greenwashing”. The author, the union, and various union members seem united in believing this is cost cutting (should I scare quote cost cutting?).

Well, sure. It is cost cutting. But the very best places to cut costs are places where the customer will like it _better_ with the cheaper solution. Here are some examples of _awesome_ cost cutting: Amazon’s Frustration Free Packaging, USPSTF deciding that you _don’t_ need to do that screening test that will lead to you having your dick roto rootered unnecessarily, resulting in incontinence and/or impotence and having no meaningful impact on your all causes mortality or even your five year survival rate if you still get cancer Down There. We’re slowly working on backing away from some other screening for women, but it is still a touchy subject so I won’t Go There. Anyway. Customers _really_ like not having daily housekeeping. So, not having daily housekeeping means a per night cost goes away (not true, of course — they want to make sure you haven’t set up a meth lab or whatever in there, so they are going to go in and clean the room every 3 days regardless) AND the customer is happier.

Here are some observations.

First, only about 30% of hotel stays generate a tip to housekeeping. It’s hard to completely nail this down, but this is more or less what I’m finding.

Second, the tips that people _do_ leave for housekeeping are surprisingly small. We’re talking $2-3.

Third, if you pay a hotel housekeeper federal minimum wage, and require them to do two rooms per hour or you will lay them off, then you are basically paying them roughly $4 per room. In practice, most hotels are paying more than this — but not a lot more. We are talking on the order of $10/room. (Again, assuming a 2 room / hour minimum quota, and that the housekeeper isn’t making more than $20/hour. So, if you are thinking, hey, just raise the federal minimum to $15! Well, that would be $7.50/room, not really that impressive, right?)

Now, when most of the rooms that a housekeeper is maintaining require trash removal, replacement of consumables (shampoo, soap, towels, TP, makeup wipes, tissue box) and bed making, maybe run the vac over crumbs around the table and a quick wipe of the sink, mirror and counter at the vanity, and make the bed, $4-$10 is not outrageous. It’s not great — if you had a choice that wasn’t picking strawberries or peaches or whatever, you would take it — but it isn’t life threatening. However, when most of the rooms that the housekeeper is maintaining require all of that, vac the whole room, scrub the combo and the toilet and _change_ the sheets on the bed, $4, $7.50, $10 / room no longer seems like a good deal. It is sounding kinda painful.

For reference purposes, I live in a 4 bedroom center hall colonial with more than 2K sq ft but less than 3K. While I haven’t had it cleaned by someone else for a while now, when it was being cleaned, it cost me $99 to the agency and I tipped $20. A typical hotel room in this country is more than 300 sq ft but well under 400 sq ft. A little math suggests that an equivalent fee based on square footage (for reference purposes, I said 2600 sq ft for my house and 325 sq ft for the hotel room and $119 for the amount I paid to have the house done weekly) is a little under $15. 2 rooms / hour implies $30 an hour.

Now, _to be fair_, a typical 325 sq ft hotel room does _not_ have a kitchen, and anyone who cleans houses knows perfectly well that that’s where the worst of the mess is, with the downstairs lav or bathroom (or only bathroom) being a close contender. OTOH, people do frequently have coffee, a pastry, pizza, takeout, etc. in that 325 square feet. So. Not sure which way you should adjust the pricing.

Let’s talk about time now.

My house was spec’ed at a 3 hour job. (Making the same assumptions: 2600 sq ft for my house and 325 for the hotel room.) That suggests 22.5 minutes per room. So I don’t think that requiring 2 rooms per hour is inherently wrong, altho that’s super tight in terms of allowing time to transition in and out of and to the next room.

My sister’s solution is, Tip Heavily! Personally, I think that daily housecleaning should go away entirely, the wage should increase to reflect the increased physical difficulty of the job, or, more time should be allowed because having to rush through housework is where almost all of the awfulness lies. And I think that the quota in general should have some adjustments made to it. Here are some possible adjustments.

(1) How many people are in that room? If you use my family of 4 in my house as a basis of comparison, anything more than a half a person (literally, a half a person) will be generating more work (on the theory that the more people are in a space, the more of a disaster it becomes. They’ve got data. They could have a reference team of cleaners go into a room with one person, a room with 2 people, a room with 1 person and a toddler, etc. They could then run the information they generate through something and come up with an adjustment. 1 person = 30 minutes to do the room. Add a toddler, and you get an hour. That type of thing.

(2) Age of people in the room (see toddler example in (1), but I’m sure you can think of other situations.)

(3) Amount of cooking facilities (a room with a mini fridge and a microwave, for example, should get extra minutes.)

The above discussion suggests that this is a horribly complex situation. And I honestly have not at any point asked why there isn’t a fleet of robot vacuum cleaners cleaning the floors. That, right there (no, not the robots — the complexity of the underlying reality) is why policy is terrible (if this were simple, management would have already done it) and the union response is kinda random and evil. Hey, Let’s Blame Environmentalism! Sure, if we pit Greens against SJW, that’ll turn out _spectacularly_ well as rhetoric.

Basically, the union is throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. I hope to hell this one doesn’t stick, because I do NOT want to live in a world in which my desire to treat the environment well and have it be nice for the kiddos and future generations in general must go toe to toe with my desire to treat other people well.

ETA:

Some scheduling formula / discussion from a management perspective:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-amount-of-time-housekeeping-spends-per-room-at-a-5-star-hotel-to-prepare-for-a-new-guest

This is from _pre_ incentivizing declining daily housekeeping. I’m currently searching for discussion of how to adjust the formula for post incentivizing declining housekeeping. Note that the discussion of the formula factors in pretty much everything I got into above, right down to number of people in the room. They did not get into age of people in the room / presence of toddlers. They may know something I don’t.

https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/housekeeping-best-practices-to-improve-productivity

This describes how to quantify the expected difference in cleaning time for a checkout vs. a stayover. AGAIN this is pre incentivizing declining daily housekeeping.

https://www.hotelmanagement.net/operate/housekeeping-best-practices-to-improve-productivity

I would _expect_ that as long as it takes to clean a checkout AFTER daily housekeeping through the stay, it would take even longer to clean a checkout with NO daily housekeeping through the stay (or only on the 3rd day or whatever). Someone’s got a formula, if only I could find it...

This is not about formulae — this one is about a specific app being used to assign rooms to clean. It has some issues. One hopes that they will be addressed in updates; certainly that is what Unite Here is working for:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/hotel-housekeepers-schedules-app-marriott-union-hotsos-20180702.html