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Union Maid
The people who make up your fancy hotel room are invisible, but
powerful - now that they've realized they can put downtown economies
through the wringer
John Lorinc
Friday, April 28, 2006
Every morning shortly after 6 a.m., Althea Porter leaves her
Mississauga home for a trek into the core of Toronto, where she works at
a large Holiday Inn whose shape begs comparison to a wedding cake.
She makes up 16 rooms each day, and is joined, on busy days, by some
two dozen other room attendants. If everything's going smoothly, it
should take a veteran attendant like Porter about 30 minutes to get a
room ready for the next guest. That means stripping the sheets,
replacing the bedding, cleaning the coffee pot and glasses, swabbing the
bathroom, collecting the garbage, replenishing the soap, towels and
stationery, and generally straightening up the place.
If everything isn't going smoothly - if there's a foyer full of
conventioneers waiting for rooms or if Porter has to scour the hotel
looking for supplies the day becomes a race against time. She routinely
skips breaks and wolfs down her lunch. "Sometimes," Porter says, "people
don't even take lunch."
Business people, says Filomena Canedo, an attendant who works on the
other side of downtown at the Royal Meridien King Edward Hotel, tend not
to make a big mess: "They just check in for one night." And long-term
guests are the ones who are most likely to leave a note of thanks. But
with tourists, kids' hockey teams or revellers in town for New Year's or
a festival like Caribana, it's another story. "When you have families in
the summer, then you have rooms that are really trashed," says Porter.
"Those are the worst times for room attendants."
And over all, their jobs have gotten a lot tougher in the past year
or two. Responding to competitive pressure, many hotel chains have laid
on splendid queen- or even king-sized mattresses, plush duvets, extra
pillows and other goodies for guests. "They call it 'signature service,'
where everything is well done," says Canedo. "You put out the amenities
so that when the guest enters the room, it's a heavenly place to stay, a
second home. We do that every day."
Problem is, the attendants are still only getting 30 minutes per
room. And when the mattress is large and heavy, upwards of 50 kilograms,
it's awkward to change the sheets. Because of that extra weight and the
bulky new duvets, attendants are suffering back and shoulder injuries.
"I don't mind serving the guests, but not when it affects my health,"
says Porter, who earns $14.68 per hour after 13 years in the industry.
Workers like Porter have become more outspoken about the workload:
This year, with no fewer than 400 hotel contracts up for renegotiation
across North America, their union, UNITE HERE, has launched a hard-nosed
bargaining campaign. The union, a 450,000-member giant created in 2004
with the merger of needle trades and hotel unions, aims to persuade the
industry to provide its employees not with just higher wages but also
with improved working conditions. Specifically, the union is looking for
a reduction in the number of rooms an attendant must make up per shift
and a guarantee that everyone gets breaks, to stop the practice of
"working off the clock."
Paul Clifford, president of the UNITE local in Toronto, points to
other "quality-of-life" issues, such as stiff-by-design mattresses. For
guests, that's about getting a good night's sleep. But the room
attendants have to lift the whole mattress when they change the sheets
another factor that helps explain their injury rate, now higher than
that of construction workers, according to union officials. The customer
doesn't always come first, says Clifford. "Health and safety should
trump everything."
Clifford points out that, during UNITE's talks with the Fairmont
chain, the union negotiated a "reasonable workload" provision in its
contract, unprecedented language, he adds. The three-year deal, covering
850 employees, also included wage increases of between 9.3% and 10.5%,
and subsidized public-transit passes.
Given the Fairmont Royal York's flagship status in town, the deal was
met with a sigh of relief across Toronto's tourist industry. In 2004,
hotel staff in San Francisco walked out and crippled the convention
industry, which normally gushes expense-account money into restaurants,
retailing, culture and tourism.
Toronto, still suffering from the SARS stigma, is gearing up for a
year of cultural celebrations designed to attract tourists, which means
leverage for the union:There are no less than 30 hotel agreements up for
renegotiation in the city this year. As Porter says, "The room
attendants are the backbone of the hotels because if the rooms aren't
clean, they can't sell them."
Unions like UNITE, the Service Employees International Union and the
United Steelworkers have been increasingly successful in expanding in
big-city service sectors security guards, taxi drivers, janitors,
garment workers and long-term-care staff that depend on an
ever-expanding pool of immigrants. In fast-growing Las Vegas, UNITE's
membership has leapt to 50,000, from 10,000 in 1987.
Compared to negotiating higher wages for middle-class civil servants,
signing up the service sector is a return to the working-class roots of
the labour movement. And it's the only place where unions can swell
their ranks, given that membership has declined elsewhere. "For unions,
it's a no-brainer," says Anil Verma, an industrial relations expert at
the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
Tourism Toronto estimates that seven of 10 local hotel workers are
new Canadians, mostly from the Philippines, China, Sri Lanka and South
America. The average salary is $10.48 an hour, while the median
housekeeper wage is $26,000 a year. It's not quite below the poverty
line, but many room attendants hold down two or three jobs to make ends
meet in high-cost Toronto.
Porter and Canedo face a familiar immigrant quandary: Porter, who is
from Jamaica, was a fashion designer before settling in Canada; Canedo
left her children behind in her native Philippines, where she was a high
school teacher. "I thought coming here would give me a lot of
opportunity," says Canedo. "I ended up being a room attendant. I had to
love my job and do it in order to raise my kids back home."
Once inside the hotel world, both women discovered its rigid class
system: The front-of-house desk staff are perched at the top, followed
by switchboard operators, then room supervisors, room attendants and, at
the bottom of the heap, laundry workers. The front of the house tend to
be white; behind the scenes, non-white.
Lilian Salvador, who also works at a Toronto Holiday Inn but is on
medical leave with a shoulder injury, says that in the event of a
dispute, management will always find the room attendant in the wrong.
"If the room attendant has a complaint, they are reprimanded," she says.
Room attendants who want to move up the ladder find their ambitions
thwarted if they are considered to be "troublemakers," adds Salvador.
This frustration of upward aspiration is the very grist of labour
organizing. "Look," says U of T's Verma, "making beds is not a new
occupation. It's just that we're setting higher standards for quality of
life and work in our society, so [these employees] need training and
career mobility, just as in the auto and steel industries."
In the meantime, comfort is a zero-sum game: The traveller's
luxurious thread-count is the room attendant's backache.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
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