With up to 17 rooms to clean each shift, Fatima Amahmoud’s job at the Moxy hotel in downtown Boston sometimes feels impossible.
There was the time she found three days worth of blond dog fur clinging to the curtains, the bedspread and the carpet. She knew she wouldn’t finish in the 30 minutes she is supposed to spend on each room. The dog owner had declined daily room cleaning, an option that many hotels have encouraged as environmentally friendly but is a way for them to cut labor costs and cope with worker shortages since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unionized housekeepers, however, have waged a fierce fight to restore automatic daily room cleaning at major hotel chains, saying they have been saddled with unmanageable workloads, or in many cases, fewer hours and a decline in income.
The dispute has become emblematic of the frustration over working conditions among hotel workers, who were put out of their jobs for months during pandemic shutdowns and returned to an industry grappling with chronic staffing shortages and evolving travel trends.
The “no daily room cleaning” thing is and always has been bullshit. They used COVID as an excuse for it. It was a way to cut cost and provide less value to the customer.
I’ve been watching everything get cut in the quest for endless growth all my life. When I was a kid, my mom went to the bank and they had a bunch of tellers. Now, at the branch I use, they have a dozen spots at the counter and never more than two tellers. Everything keeps getting shittier as capitalism consumes itself.
I usually hang the do not disturb sign most of the week just because I don’t like having random people around my shit. But after reading this I’m reconsidering how I work hotel stays.
If that’s your preference that’s fine. The ridiculous part was them stopping it as a default. It resulted in scenarios like people paying $800 per night to stay in a Disney hotel and having an undersized room that doesn’t even get cleaned during the week they are there.