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 point is that the choice should be left with the customer and not the hotel.
Which point? It doesn’t seem like that is what the union is pushing for. I mean sure, they probably aren’t asking the hotel to forcibly clean customers rooms, but even doing it by default seems like the wrong direction. It should be on request. And the employees pay shouldn’t depend on the customers whims. It should be stable pay that they are asking for with the possibility of overtime.