What is life like for housekeepers who work the hotels of Miami Beach? Michelle Chen opens the curtains to what's hidden behind all the sun and fun of spring break in Miami Beach.
How did you find some of these folks who were willing to talk considering the fear they must feel speaking up?
A lot of these workers have really little to no protection. Florida is a so-called Right to Work state. So basically you can kind of be fired pretty easily for any reason. And obviously when you're working in a low wage industry in a burgeoning sector like hospitality there are a lot of workers looking for work. And if your boss wants to get rid of you, he can probably hire someone just as easily, you know, within a couple, a couple of minutes or days. So workers are seen as expendable and because of that they are burdened with both really precarious, often dangerous working conditions, as well as a constant fear that if they speak out about those conditions they could risk their livelihood.
I wanted to get the sense of really how hotels are treating these housekeepers during the big events like spring break and how much time they are expecting these housekeepers to work and what they're paying them.
I want to give an example of industry practice that is common for many low-wage hotel workers. This is basically coming up with the system of paying people per room. They might claim that overall it evens out because they can get minimum wage standards. But generally, the way the wage is calculated day-to-day is not using the standard hourly wage rate. Rather, it's taking into account, basing the entire wage on how many rooms they can clean. So a typical wage rate might be about $3.50 per room. When you think about that you know you that could mean that if you can do two or three rooms in an hour you're still kind of making a minimum wage. And you can maybe scrimp by in Miami, but when it comes to a spring break room it's going to bear all the signs of this rather bacchanalian party ritual that goes on every year and so it's going to be a lot messier and lot more time-consuming.
One of the other things you point out too is the issue of sexual harassment. What did you find that was surprising about what some of these women go through in their day-to-day work ?
It's a fairly routine thing that happens in all service industries that are very gendered, and housekeeping is a very gendered sector of work. Many times that job lends itself to the kinds of situations that can leave a worker vulnerable. You know, obviously it's not anyone's fault when when you're in a situation that leads to harassment. But if if you're working, for instance, alone rather than in pairs, when you're going up and down empty hotel hallways, when it's very easy for a worker to be cornered in a room that can lead to pretty dangerous situations and you know what would happen periodically even routinely for some housekeepers, they encounter customers who might be drunk or might be aggressive and who might exhibit some pretty unwanted sexual aggression. And there's very little that they can do. Even in terms of just getting recourse to their boss. Many of them, for a variety of reasons, might feel uncomfortable, say, making a complaint about that. Many of them would rather maybe just keep working and not let something like that slow down their work day, because again, they have to clean as much as possible in as short a time as possible. And sadly, the efficiencies that are required of the job can be pretty dehumanizing and forcing workers to put up with that kind of mistreatment is part of that dehumanization.
Did you have any luck getting hotels or hotel management to talk?
One of the things I encountered was that sometimes workers don't want to say their name or identify the hotel they work for. Unless you work for a union, there's very little protecting you. The names themselves may not be public in this article. But I just hope that I could give the issue some justice by bringing some awareness of the general conditions in the industry. The union is one of the only advocacy forces out there that is waging a public battle to improve working conditions, not only in the hotels that they represent but in the sector overall and there to hold this entire industry accountable.
