In some Las Vegas hotels I no longer need to stop at a counter or stand in a line and it’s 1000x better experience. I can walk directly to my room and scan my phone. I can scan my phone for parking. I can grab extra keys at a kiosk, if I need them. I never have to talk to anyone, if I don’t want to.
I also select the option not to have my room cleaned each day. I’ll ask someone in the hall for towels if I stay long enough to need them. I’ve wondered if this is easier or harder for them. I try to keep my trash well organized and otherwise make it as easy as I can on the staff after I leave.
I would assume the reputable but cost-cutting hotels would still be doing a full clean between guest visits, just cutting down on the daily room cleaning while a guest is still there.
Every single hotel or motel should be doing full clean between guest visits, otherwise it should not even be allowed to operate.
But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, they will inevitably end up with hoarders and people that keep food lying around and then comes cockroaches and rats and odors, etc.
> But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, ...
Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agree with your conclusion (filthy guests who stay weeks invite pest problems) ... so if the big bad old hotel industry needs to market their advantages, maybe there's an Institutuionally Clean angle.
This is really the heart of the issue with all these new "disruptive" industries. They're cheaper because they avoid a lot of the regulation, but all that regulation exists for a reason. Whether you're replacing taxis with Uber or hotels with airbnb, you're saving money by allowing room for all the problems that made the regulation necessary in the first place.
The problem here is when regulation moves beyond safety into protectionism, which I submit ALOT of regulation for both hotels and taxis is FAR FAR FAR removed from simply protecting health and safety and instead is more about preventing new entrants into the market and protecting current business models
Could also be compensation for a medallion system the government was forcing Taxi company’s to buy into.
Force people to spend X00,000$/car to enter a market and then let ride-shares ignore that requirement that’s going to push all these companies to bankruptcy simply because the newcomers don’t have to pay interest on these loans.
There’s always a trade off between “cost” and everything else. If you’re wealthy enough they cost doesn’t really matter to you, regulation is fine because it leads to higher quality experiences in general.
But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.
> But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
The problem is that without regulation there is little incentive for business to be honest about the quality of service you're getting. It becomes a race to the bottom as they charge premium prices for cut-rate quality. It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep and arrive late at night to a room that isn't what you expect. They just have to make their dispute process hard enough to keep customer money.
And if you day that's fraud, sure it is, but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.
IMO regulation isn't perfect, but we should aim to fix it instead of throwing it out the window entirely
> It's hard for people to take your business elsewhere when you need a place to sleep
I think this is actually how most people end up deciding to take their business elsewhere: they give a company their business once, are let down, and decide to never patronize that business or chain again. This is why customer recommendations and reviews hold weight at all -- they help give signal before your first business interaction.
> but fraud is only something you can charge a business with because of regulation.
I don't think almost anyone is in favor of no regulation, only the prescriptive step-by-step guideline regulations. If a hotel says "we have beds!" and then they don't have beds, that's a very different regulatory case than a hotel saying "our bed are comfortable!" and then their beds are not comfortable.
> But if you’re not as wealthy, saving money might be more valuable to you than having a room cleaned daily, or having a really nice tv, or a great mattress, etc.
And perhaps saving money might be even more valuable to you than <what you wrote above, but every "or" being progressively replaced with an "and">!
> Regulation involves a group of people picking one point on a trade off curve for everyone. Branding and reputation systems allow for multiple different spots on that reputation curve.
Yes, but that "one point on a trade off curve for everyone" works as a backstop against inevitable slide downwards. If globalization of trade and e-commerce taught us anything, reputation systems are trivially gamed, most branding exists primarily to fool people who still think it means something into spending more for less.
Even without talking about potential fraud, market competition naturally turns into race to the bottom. Regulation is what sets that bottom higher than "absolute worst possible before the market segment self-destructs".
There are many different levels of hotel rooms. But, as with many things, service worker labor has gotten more expensive relative to other things (Baumol cost disease basically). So it makes sense for hotels and other industries to automate or simply eliminate things like daily room cleanings that most customers don't actually value a lot.
Pretty sure some airbnbs don’t even clean between guests. I’ve had some iffy experiences, and because of the consistently issues, it’s why I prefer hotels now unless there’s no other option.
Without knowing what sort of information sharing exists among hotels, I'd suspect that AirBnB has a much stronger reputation signal that can be relied upon, which should disincentivize and blacklist people who are trashing places or causing pest problems.
With Airbnb you're on the hook for cleaning costs..at a hotel the assumption is the hotel will clean up your mess (as long as it's not extreme or unreasonable)
Hotels are certainly charging the guests for cleaning up; it is just not broken out as a separate charge. Of course, Airbnb’s do not have the economies of scale that a hotel has and in some cases for short term rentals charge more for the cleaning than the rented space. I stay with the pros and avoid Airbnb’s for both cost and convenience reasons.
>Every single hotel or motel should be doing full clean between guest visits, otherwise it should not even be allowed to operate.
'Should be' yes, but you'd be surprised how many don't follow through on this, and not necessarily due to lack of policy. Cleaning staff have very tight schedules, being allocated only a few minutes to completely clean and setup the room for the new guest but if the old guest didn't follow through on the exact checkout time, then that throws of the schedule of the cleaning staff completely, meaning they often cut corners to meet their deadlines.
This is undoubtedly true, but I don't think it affects the main point. Doing less room-cleaning (or charging more for each time it happens) doesn't mean inter-guest cleaning is affected.
Even if there is some food lying around in a room on the 3rd floor, the cockroaches and rats won't just materialize out of thin air. Unless the hygienic conditions are generally bad anyway, but then the hotel has a bigger problem than one dirty room...
> the cockroaches and rats won't just materialize out of thin air
In practice, you can assume they do - it's a simplified but accurate model of reality when you're not researching the life of insects and rodents.
Yes, life does not appear "out of thin air", but it constantly tries to get in, will exploit any crack in your defenses or attention to chase after anything that looks or smells like food or safety. It's simpler to just assume annoying critters materialize out of thin air if you leave the right conditions, and ensure those conditions are never present.
It's kind of like thermodynamics / statistical physics: the air around you doesn't really have "pressure" or "temperature", but you may just as well assume they're a thing, since the alternative would be to talk about kinematics of air molecules.
We had a mouse problem once. The ended up being a small hole drilled in the side of the house to install a cat5 cable for a security camera. The hole couldn't have been more than 1.5 cm in diameter, and it had a cat 5 cable running through it - but apparently this was enough space for a mouse to squeeze through.
All you need are some outside cats roaming the spacious yard to discourage the small cute furry little rodents from “cozying” up in your house. When living in an urban dwelling with 50 other families, other strategies are needed.
Yeah; we've had mouse problems in our 90-ish-year-old house ever since we moved in a decade+ ago. Then in the winter of 2019-20, a cat started sheltering in our garage on a regular basis.
We had no mouse problems that winter, and very few since then.
I once heard that nowhere on Earth you're ever more than 6 meters away from a rat. I don't think that's true, but it's probably still a bad idea to blindly assume that there's no vermin anywhere. You keep vermin away by not feeding them.
> owhere on Earth you're ever more than 6 meters away from a rat. I don't think that's true
I see that as realistic, if we are talking 2D spaces. In urban environments, they live in sewers, and you have sewers under every building. In the countryside, they obviously live everywhere.
I can see that 6-metres rule broken only if going 3D, i.e. in multi-storey buildings with spotless maintenance of any nook and cranny, living on the third or fourth floor, you might be a bit further away than that.
It's probably not worth it just to avoid the rats, but Antartica is rat-free. (Other extremely cold places are likely to be as well, at least enough to make the 6-meter distance.)
I recently made a bad choice in hotel and ended up at a fairly dodgy looking place, most of the lights in the room didn’t function and the shower didn’t work properly, but it was spotlessly clean so I accepted the mistake.
No, it means that when housekeeping fails to clean a room, for whatever reason, he can't rent it out.
The people losing their minds and screaming at him is what happens when something else that isn't quite to their satisfaction happens. Like, say, the hotel requiring a deposit and a major credit card and ID to book a room.
First off roaches are endemic to Las Vegas. Like NYC. I don’t care how clean you think you are, if you don’t have pest control services, you will get roaches.
Secondly hotels inside of casinos both outside of and including the strip will regularly clean rooms. They also have regular pest control services, as the rooms are high traffic and constantly occupied.
> Jim Frantz, whose San Diego-based law firm represents another 199 victims including Romo, said Thursday's settlement is a good first step. Now MGM must strengthen the security protocol at all their facilities, he said.
>"I would assume a responsible business, after going through something like this, would institute the highest level of security," Frantz said, adding that the company should add metal detectors and Navy SEAL-type security guards. "As long as we have automatic weapons, we've got to be on high alert with all our security."
Don't you just love how our society "fights" terrorism? Someone used something to kill someone, so let's ruin that thing for everyone, forever! Also see: air travel. I was a kid in the 90s and so I didn't fly before 9/11, but people say it was a much more enjoyable experience.
Pre 9/11 to now for air travel is the difference between day and night. It's not even close. This pretend, fake security we have today imposes so many burdens and costs on people who wish to travel. The least suspicious would easily think that the changes were meant to federalize a big portion of many people's lives.
Plus they’re not banning mobile phones or computers, and the best way to get something on fire is to shortcut a Li-ion battery - how much energy does a macbook contain.
I think you might be mis-reading the GP's point. It's not that it's a common occurrence for laptops to spontaneously combust, but rather than an adversary could intentionally cause one (or several) to do so.
Yes. Wrap it in some inflammable scarf/coat to get it going. Or find an Android vulnerability and make several phones burn at the same time.
Anyway, it’s no more a risk than guns or water on planes since it hasn’t happened yet; but among this security circus, it’s hypocritical to ban water and not li-ion batteries.
Inflammable and flammable are both adjectives that mean "easily set on fire". They have slightly different etymologies. In the case of inflammable, in- means "into" and is not a negation.
There's a world of difference between "you could assemble by some rube goldberg mechanism a bomb out of 100ml liquid containers" and actual firearms designed for easy long range killing.
I wonder if the lawyer is really that stupid or just puts on a good act to help sell this nonsense. Requiring security at the hotel is as dumb as requiring security at the high rise condos just down the street (they don’t and nobody would buy them if they did).
Definitely a sales pitch from the clueless tone, aiming outright at most extreme measures. End game would be optic nerve chip to make sure everybody is in line and not being threat... few big attacks and many people would even welcome it
> Muller says new hotel security measures are being developed, including new luggage scanners, which – unlike those at the airport, which may require an officer to open a customer's bag -- uses new technology to detect what's inside without the person even knowing it.
Great if you like paranoia. I guess I am not going to Vegas.
It's not exactly for that reason. The insurance companies don't want to be liable for a future similar incident, so they are pushing future liability onto hotels that don't do a million things to guard against the last incident from recurring. Then, the hotels put these checks in place, so the insurers won't push liablity costs onto them.
I guess it could be called a decrepit spiral of associative risk management.
While you are technically correct, NEARLY automatic weapons (binary triggers) are legal in most states, here's a random video for the curious: https://youtu.be/rOkAZkk__5g
And fully automatic (but illegal) weapons are easily available in the form of Glock auto sears https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp8p8/glock-switches-auto-s... my buddy in Baltimore heard on of these being shot in his Baltimore neighborhood a few weeks back.
I think this is a stretch. Binary triggers are tricky to use, and aren't nearly automatic. They're slightly more automatic than semi-automatic, but much, much less usable.
In terms of illegal weapons, yes. There are illegal fully automatic weapons in the US without taking your example into account. I'm talking about what's legal.
That's fair, although I still don't think it's that close. An actually automatic weapon is the sort of thing militaries use, and witout minimising the horror that a bump stock can cause, I think they do far more.
Back to my original point, it's still wrong to say this will happen while we have automatic weapons. Why perpetuate a lie?
Several states and the Federal government found bump stock close enough to automatic that they are no longer legal. I’d guess the quote from the article is referring to the same point of view, a thin line from the perspective of the non gun-owning layman.
It's a thin line because of terrible reporting. This is destructive because until we get basic facts clear the pro-gun people are just not going to take people who say such things seriously. No more "assault-style" weapons or "fully semi-automatic" guns. Just tell the truth and break down the semantic defenses.
Naw, it’s a thin line because the whole point of bump stocks is to make a semi-automatic fire like an automatic. Even the NRA says so, this has nothing to do with the quality of reporting.
‘In the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, twelve bump stocks were found at the scene.[7] The National Rifle Association stated on October 5, 2017, "Devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations"’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bump_stock#Federal
They did say that, and now we have fewer automatic-like weapons in the US. Hey I have no problem with your suggestion, I like the alternative wording you offered! I’m just pointing out that the quote was mostly reasonable at the time, I agree it’s slightly inaccurate as a shortcut summary of the situation, but I don’t think it’s as egregious as you claim. I’ll add that one quote out of context from one article does not establish a pattern. You jumped to complaining about the pattern without evidence of a pattern.
I thought it would be tedious to link to however many examples would illustrate a pattern. I think this wording is pretty commonplace though - military-style rifle, which sounds like "military grade" but is a motte and bailey for "looks military". That sort of thing.
I'm not a gun person at all, but I really despise manipulative language in media. That's why I'm harping on.
Not just Las Vegas hotels. Any hotel (Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, etc.) with an app that supports digital keys via Bluetooth already have this.
I still like to check in at the counter though if it looks like it isn't too busy. I have elite status at these hotels, and they typically hand out free cookies or water at the counter, and I occasionally get a free discretionary room upgrade on the spot.
Everything you can grab from a silent push in those months when you don't check in but still have the app installed out of convenience. In other words: not much, but something (e.g. the company can know that the app is still installed).
I wouldn't go to lengths avoiding installation (just remember to uninstall if it really bothers you), but I'd prefer a purely web based implementation. How about clearing arbitrary NFC UID for access? (From a self-serve counter if taking humans out of the equation is so much of a goal) The credit card form factor is certainly not inconvenient at all, but dealing with them can still be surprisingly annoying when that happens to coincide with oddities from the very long tail of luggage situations.
You have to provide location access to enable bluetooth which means things like this story of the most unethical thing this former Twitter employee was asked to build are possible: https://twitter.com/stevekrenzel/status/1589700721121058817
Precise locations, time spent at each location. And device information (model, OS), super cookie association. And if it asks permissions: contacts and photos, etc. sounds like parent would grant these permissions out of app love.
You know, Phone OSs these days have a "allow location only while using the app" permission. I only need the app while I'm at my room or while checking out.
You can also reject contact and photos permissions to apps. None of the hotel apps have asked me for these.
I find installing the app likely means more Privacy
When I travel, and in the App I provide my Work address and contact info, not my personal info
When checking in at the desk they take my government ID, often scan it into go knows what system or what security, and then replace my Work info with my personal address in their systems
In the US, I'm not sure I've ever had a desk worker more than glance at an ID. Many places do require one though--had a heck of a time checking into a Travelodge of all things once because I had lost my license. Not sure how much of this is hotel rules and how much local regulation.
Makes me wonder how this works when you use digital check-in.
It's true in Europe they often copy your license and, in some countries, I believe there's some registration with the police that the hotel handles.
What privacy do you think you’re giving up by using an application? The hotel may find out you are staying there and when you come into your room - ie something they already know?
Anything and everything the app and its 30 social, ad, and analytics SDKs are able to capture and exfiltrate from the phone.
Maybe they won't upload the list of my installed apps (which can leak information like religion or medical issues), maybe they won't track my location through the entire hotel (or everywhere), maybe they won't snoop on my pictures... but maybe they also will, and I don't like maybe.
Almost certainly I'll have to agree to lengthy ToS that will then be used as justification to inundate me with spam.
The Android permission model is particularly messed up because it changes every few SDK target versions, so it's hard to build a mental model what exactly you're allowing. Many apps that had a built-in photo-taking capability required storage access and wouldn't work without. Any app using bluetooth had to request and be granted location access (because Bluetooth could be used to track location... so any app acting as a key automatically also got to track you via GPS on top of that, and even if the app maker didn't want to they had to request the permission for Bluetooth to work).
I've seen too many companies pushing their apps aggressively and with massive rewards. They're clearly getting something out of it, and probably not something I want to give them. If you're very, very lucky, the main goal is only to make them more "sticky" (make it easier to use them over someone else next time), but that's the thing - I don't want past service providers to stick to me.
> Anything and everything the app and its 30 social, ad, and analytics SDKs are able to capture and exfiltrate from the phone.
I’m asking about iOS. If you have an Android device - using an operating system written by an ad tech company, the Hilton app is the last thing you should worry about.
Instead of being hand wavy, what exactly do you think an analytics SDK can “exfiltrate* from your phone outside of the app sandbox without your explicit permission?
> Maybe they won't upload the list of my installed apps (which can leak information like religion or medical issues),
Not possible with iOS. There was a loophole that Twitter used where they would try to send a message to another app. But Apple closed that a few versions ago.
> Almost certainly I'll have to agree to lengthy ToS that will then be used as justification to inundate me with spam
You mean the same TOS you have to sign when booking from their website? But I use the built in “Hide My Email” feature on iOS and give each app/website that I don’t care about a separate email that gets forwarded to my main email address.
> “ The Android permission model is particularly messed up because it changes every few SDK target versions, so it's hard to build a mental model what exactly you're allowing
“I care about my privacy yet I use an operating system with a poor permission model written by an adTech company”
And what if the app asks for access to your contacts? Would you grant it out of the convenience of the app, or would you deny it permission and ask for a card key?
No you don’t have to. When you share it, it creates a message with a link and brings up a share sheet controlled by iOS. You can then send the message block with the link either via email, text, or any other relevant third party app that registers a share extension.
It is all done outside of the apps process. iOS sends the message on the apps behalf to the other app.
There is no option to share your contact with the app.
Web/apps have a lot of pseudonymous data points but rarely have a link to your real-life identity. Real-life things like hotels have the latter but rarely the former. Installing an app allows data brokers to bridge the two identities.
> And how is installing the Hilton app going to allow another app to find out information about you?
Both apps rat out whatever they have on you to a data broker which then does the matching.
They need to let their phone check in work with OTAs. I just stayed at a Hilton and couldn’t use my phone as a key because I booked through hotels.com and the front desk refused to add my hhonors info to set it up. I know you can call in but not something I want to deal with after traveling all day.
The one rule I learned while traveling over the years for work is to only ever book with the hotel directly. You open yourself up to much more annoying problems when dealing with third party booking regarding any sort of problem resolution with the reservation.
The problem with that is they don't honor most of the deals. A lot of the OTAs do the 'member only' 'mobile only' etc style deals which are not covered.
That said I would book direct from Hilton but every time I do they only allow pay later which in certain currencies, I'd rather not risk (Looking at Japan right now). I'd rather pay now and lock in the rate.
I have never been able to find an Expedia/Priceline price that is lower than the Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/IHG/etc rewards member price. And being a rewards member is free, so effectively you get cheaper prices directly.
I also do not see how it would be technically possible. The hotel brands’ reservations systems are surely set to offer a discounted price on their own website than they send out to Expedia/Booking.
> they only allow pay later which in certain currencies, I'd rather not risk (Looking at Japan right now). I'd rather pay now and lock in the rate.
Hiltons are usually individually owned and managed. I would try emailing the front desk and see if they will accept a prepayment from you. I was able to prepay a Hilton in Hawaii earlier this year by contacting the front desk.
my experience is the opposite. i want to book direct, but OTAs are 70% of the time cheaper. Its "technically possible" because the OTAs in most cases have contract terms that prevent the hotel from undercutting their negotiated rates, at least in advertised online prices.
The hotel owner/management sets the price, or the automated rate setting program sets the price based on its parameters and shop of other hotels in the “comp set” (competing hotels in the area). This rate is the “best available rate” (BAR) or “best flexible rate” (BFR), and there may be a prepaid non refundable discount rate option too.
The OTAs then get this pricing information via the central reservation system and then either sell a reservation where the guest pays the OTA the BFR, and the OTA pays the hotel 85% (typically). Or the OTA offers the guest to pay the the hotel directly, in which case the hotel pays the OTA 15% commission.
Either way, it is all very automated, and there is no specific negotiated pricing. But the big brands will typically offer 2% to 6% or so discount (depending on how much hotel management wants to do) on their BFR/BAR pricing as a “rewards member” discount, as a way to avoid paying 15% to Expedia/Booking.
Restricting it to rewards members avoids the hotel from violating any agreement with the online travel agent that they also get the same BFR/BAR as everyone else.
i mean you're just proving my point. They all involve onerous claim forms, or having to call... and just read and try and navigate all the conditions and caveats on those links. No thanks, i never want to navigate that mess, who has time for that? So it ends up being, you can instantly and effortlessly book for _cheaper_ with an OTA vs the hotel website, or you can navigate some byzantine claims process and _maybe_ it ends up being cheaper if your claim is accepted.
Its not a real option for most people who value their time, and thats by design.
Can you show me an example of an Expedia or Booking price that is cheaper than a rewards member price from the hotel brand’s official website? A specific major branded hotel, on a specific date, specific room type, where the price is less on OTA versus the official hotel brand website.
Note that it is free to be a member of a hotel rewards programs, and requires giving the hotel brand no additional information, so the rewards member price is the effective price for a hotel brand.
Those are called opaque rates in the business, but not comparable to being able to reserve a hotel room directly via a website for less than the hotel’s own website.
A reasonable context of “you’ll get the lowest/best rates direct so don’t use an OTA” is reserving a specific type of room at a specific hotel at a specific time.
It is unusual to be willing to gamble on which hotel one is reserving in exchange for an uncertain amount of savings.
For work travel, you may not have a choice. (I can and do book directly when I sort of have to but I shouldn't and don't make a habit of it as it's against policy.) And you run into small foreign hotels that aren't really set up to take direct reservations especially from those who don't speak/read the language.
There is a big difference between booking business travel through Concur and using hotels.com. You get all of the benefits of booking directly - points, nights count toward status, your credit card is charged directly by Hilton - ie I get 14 points per dollar by paying with my Amex Hilton Aspire.
You're essentially saying there are different tiers of travel agents.
But you're right. There's no particular disadvantage to me booking Marriott through Amex than directly other than an (expensed) booking fee for work travel.
I guess I don't see the disadvantage with Marriott or United with my company booking agency. I do prefer to book directly in general but I'm not traveling a lot now and also prefer to generally adhere to travel policy when there's not a good reason not to.
Ahh. You’re not talking about the public AmexTravel portal.
Your company pays the booking fee instead of the hotel. On that case, you’re probably directly charged by the hotel and Egencia charges the company/end user the fee.
You realize that’s part of the terms and service? Hotels pay third party OTAs around a 20% commission. You aren’t going to get extra benefits from the hotel for booking through a third party service.
Checking in at Vegas casinos can be a nightmare if there's a big event going on--and that's pretty much the only reason I'd be there. But if there's not a line--and there usually isn't otherwise--I'll just check-in. More likely to get some sort of upgrade that way at the chain where I usually stay. And often I'll have a question or two.
Even pre-pandemic I never liked people coming in my room during my stay. First thing I always did when checking in was put the 'DND' placard on my door. All these changes just fit with how I operated for years.
I’ve always thought that hotels mandated daily cleaning just to check you are not performing illegal activities (abduction, drugs, sharing the room, prostitution), having a heart attack or stuck and need help.
no, not really - they (vegas) did briefly after the mass shooting from the resort window, but before that, and since then I always leave the DND sign up, even if I am there for a week, and never had a problem.
Increasingly marginalized and having to go through time-consuming hoops. There are a lot of things you're not technically required to have in the US like credit/debit cards, bank accounts, and government issued ID. But living a typical middle class lifestyle without them is... difficult.
I was recently denied opening a PO Box because I no longer have a working phone number. This is apparently "required contact information" (by USPS regulation).
Parking in my town is largely paid for via an APP — which is frustrating for somebody not using a mobile phone. The coin-accepting meters are rapidly disappearing.
Thanks for the info. I haven't traveled since COVID, so I don't know how things have changed. I bet hotels made a lot of changes due to COVID.
I know this is OT: But I am tired of every business I go to bugging me to use their app for everything. I don't want another app to keep track of, and I do not want to get texts all the time.
Thankfully some companies just send you a QR-code via email to interact with what ever system they are using.
If I remember correctly one of my hotels I used sent me a pin code or such via email and then they had a self service to get a keycard, which used the pin code.
Sort of. I don't like my dwelling with some amounts of my possessions present being rifled through while I am not there, but many motels are now requiring housekeeping every couple of days DND sign or not.
Unstaffed hotels have a major (in my view, fatal) flaw staring you right in the face: poor security.
The one and only time I stayed in such a place - an intruder was caught entering my room and diddling with a phone I left there - and he only got caught because I happened to double back to get something, and just happened to do so while he was in there.
Never again. And the best part about staffed hotels? "I never have to use my phone, if I don't want to."
I'm the opposite... I honestly get frustrated with kiosks, usually the interface staff has is better/faster and I prefer the human contact. Even though I work with technology and generally like computers, I'm the type of person that I'll go to my desktop to do things I could do on my phone, but far more annoying on the phone.
> In some Las Vegas hotels I no longer need to stop at a counter or stand in a line and it’s 1000x better experience. I can walk directly to my room and scan my phone. I can scan my phone for parking. I can grab extra keys at a kiosk, if I need them. I never have to talk to anyone, if I don’t want to.
You can do that with literally any Hilton hotel anywhere in the country whether it’s a Waldorf or Home2Suites or a Tru. You can share your digital key with up to 4 people.
They do. And they have for a very long time! At least with Avis I've been doing this for years. The app tells me where my car is located and I just walk to it and the key is in it.
App-based check-in is great, but I’ve found the phone-as-key system to be lousy when it comes to elevator swiping (to get access to higher floors). What hotels do this well?
> I never have to talk to anyone, if I don’t want to.
I have seen this attitude at more and more people, where does it come from? Meaning not wanting to talk with other people. It's what makes us humans, talking with other people. The alternative is lots and lots of money paid on psychotherapy and the like further down the road, or worse.
Because actively avoiding talking to other people it's like bringing your car for regular checkups every 100k miles instead of ~15-20k miles, which will of course irremediably damage it.
They did say 'if they don't want to'...and how many of us can honestly say that we want to talk to someone ALL OF THE TIME?
Talking to someone about checking in for a hotel room, after waiting for 10 minutes in a check in line...is not what I would call a fulfilling experience. Communication does not make us human, plenty of other species communicate...there are far more intricate and unique things that make us what we are.
You're equating someone's wish to not have to wait at a check out counter to being anti-social...come on.
> You're equating someone's wish to not have to wait at a check out counter to being anti-social...come on.
Yes, 10 minutes waiting in a hotel lobby, which is by definition a societal space, is, well, social. Actively wanting go avoid that is, well, anti-social.
I think you are not understanding introverts. Social interaction is extremely draining for us, so we carefully manage that energy for interactions that also offer a lot of value in return, e.g. friends and colleagues. If we can reduce unnecessary interactions, this leaves more for being social where it’s valuable, making it possible for us to be pro social.
I love parties, deep conversations, etc. but as an introverted person, a day of excessive unnecessary interaction makes those interactions I do enjoy no longer enjoyable, and just a chore. By managing my social energy I am able to be a warm, friendly, and outgoing social person. If you met me at a party you probably would not guess that I’m introverted, because I am not antisocial. Yet, I would be willing to pay a lot more for a hotel room where I don’t have to make small talk at a front desk while checking in.
> Actively wanting go avoid that is, well, anti-social.
Ah the epitome of social interactions. An underpaid and overworked service worker mis-hears my name, pretends to not find me in the system then gives me a card. Well worth queuing for!
But you know it is a must, since if I continue the conversation with my travel companion uninterrupted all the way to our room then I am actively tearing apart the fabric of society.
> Anyway, it's a losing battle at this point.
Battle? Why do you care how others choose to live their life this much? Are they hurting you?
Yes, it hurts me to see the social fabric tearing itself apart. It’s on us, people of “today”, to try to keep it in one place as best as we can and to pass it forward to those that will come after us.
> ince if I continue the conversation with my travel companion uninterrupted all the way to our room then I am actively tearing apart the fabric of society.
Yes, the social norms (of the past, at this point) say that you should interrupt the discussion with your travel companion and engage with the person from the other side of the counter (the hotel receptionist in this case).
You believe that the interaction I have with the Hotel Front Desk person is a meaningful social interaction, whereby if I do not have it I would need to seek mental health treatment?
Yes, that is my position. Why wouldn't it be? Society is formed of all people, not only acquaintances and friends. Yes, including the hotel receptionist.
> whereby if I do not have it I would need to seek mental health treatment
Yes, when people were not treating people such as hotel receptionists like the other that is not worthy of our attention then we were doing way better on the mental health front.
Some human interaction is essential for your mental health, but not all human interaction is good for your mental health. Especially if it involves waiting in line before subjecting yourself to bureaucratic drudgery. If they can make those experiences smoother, I'm all for it.
What do you mean "where does it come from"? People can't have their own personalities or preferences and be not-so-sociable? And regarding "It's what makes us humans", I'm sorry that's not true and also you don't get to define what human is.
The problem is related to how hotels (and hospitality in general) are hiring. No one is willing to pay the money any more for staff that is qualified for more than entering data into a computer, or for enough staff to keep waiting lines short.
I travel for work semi frequently and my wife and I started “digital nomadding” six months out of the year flying across the country staying in mostly Hilton brand hotels.
I fly in. Click on the hotel address on the Hilton app that takes me to Apple Maps and get an Uber to the hotel through Maps. On the ride to the hotel, I do the digital check in, request my digital key and walk directly to the room.
I’m going to be talking to people all day the next day.
I'm concerned about an economy where the different strata never interact with each other. It's all too easy to lose compassion for the people who keep the world running for you if you never see them. If you have a delivery driver brave the elements to bring you food, you should have to face them.
However it's nice to do things on your own sometimes. For example I love McDonalds self-checkout because it speaks my language everywhere on the planet, and gives me all the time I need to prepare my order.
It is concerning indeed, and what’s more concerning is an economy where tech pushes out most jobs. Where will it lead to? What are non tech people supposed to work?
On one hand, you can't artificially preserve jobs that are not needed. You can't keep mining coal to protect the coal miners.
On the other, automation concentrates wealth in the pockets of those who finance it. Automated checkout machines do not benefit fast food workers, only investors. What happens when you automate a third or a half of the workforce like that?
I hope that we can share the spoils of all this innovation, because the future will be very bleak otherwise.
Which is exactly the problem I was pointing out, i.e. even greater segregation for our society as a whole, even greater alienation at the individual level.
Maybe, but what's the alternative? Stand in line for 20 minutes so you can deal with a surly customer service person who's too busy playing on their phone to help you, and has a bad attitude too?
Here in Japan, it's entirely different. Customer service people are always polite, so it's always pleasant dealing with them, though westerners frequently complain that such people here aren't "chatty" like Americans; instead they're really efficient and don't waste peoples' time with chit-chat (which in America, frequently seems to result in making people wait longer unless there's only one customer). But I also don't see the segregation in society that I saw in America.
I've started to dislike this perspective, because it feels like an "if the only tool you have is a hammer..." kind of explanation. It's a valid perspective, but it's not the only one, and other perspectives are often more useful.
Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't.
Or maybe hotels have to rethink their business models. It's an inevitable consequence of real wage growth that labor becomes more expensive relative to goods and services. At some point, the old ways are no longer viable. Hotels can't hire as many housekeepers as before, because people are not willing to pay enough for hotel rooms. Hotels must then find ways to provide housekeeping more efficiently with less labor.
As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time
Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers.
I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs !
I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ?
When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs.
Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled.
They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything.
That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs.
If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value.
(Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)
> When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs.
Funnily enough I had the same thought when I arrived at JFK; compared to EU airports there seemed to be so many people just pointing you in a direction or yelling at you to get in a queue. It struck me that better UX and signage would make those people redundant (literally)
I've arrived at other airports at busy times (e.g. the return to Heathrow) and it's not comparable. Perhaps there are more non-English speakers arriving at JFK?
It's more complex, and I really wish people wouldn't try to look at this purely from an economic perspective.
If you see excessive workers in any government run agency, whether it's Willie Brown appointing 100 "mayoral advisors" in San Francisco, or 30 people standing around pointing towards an exit sign at a train station, then you are watching patronage networks in action. It's not like the station can't afford signage, or that those running the station are too stupid to allocate labor efficiently. We should not look down on these countries and their capabilities, they are just stuck in a different equilibrium.
Poor nations, if they could avoid it, would always choose to spend less money per government service delivered, as it would allow them to deliver more service. It's not true that labor is cheap in poor nations. It's cheap for a rich nation, but not for the poor nation. But they are often governed in such a way that in order to obtain and keep power, you have adopt a clientist governance model, which is so common throughout the world, and this is a big reason why the nation in question is poor in the first place.
Then you can ask "Why are nations governed on clientist principles?" And the answer is often related to the nation not having any other "glue" holding people together or incentivizing them to respect rule of law. To support a leader, they want some money in their pocket given to them by that leader. If he says no, another leader will arise that will offer to put that money in your pocket, and then that will be the one you support. The easiest way to give someone money is to give them a job where they get paid for doing very little. This continues in the private sector -- you are opening a tourist hotel and need good relations with a local notable. Well, he will expect that you hire many of his relatives or supporters. Then those supporters have a reason to support that leader -- because again he puts money in their pocket. The result is a different view of labor -- where jobs are given to people based on who they know and which patron is looking out for them. Such a system provides great stability -- Rome was built on these types of patronage networks. They may even be the oldest form of labor organization around -- the idea that random people should be hired based solely on whether they were needed or had qualifications -- that's a relative new, and in some sense dehumanizing way of looking at labor. In a clientist model, a jobs are assigned based on relationships.
To counter this requires a strong cultural opposition to seeking this type of self-interest, and very few nations or regions have this. Even the U.S. was plagued by clientism after the large migration waves at the end of the 19th Century, as many cities became run by various machines that catered primarily to those ethnic groups that followed clientism in their native lands. It was what they expected from a leader in the old country, and so it was carried over here. Those old machines turned out to be incredibly hard to dismantle, requiring almost a century long struggle, and in many cities like San Francisco or Philadelphia, these machines are still in operation. So this is not at all related to the GDP, except for the fact that clientist nations tend to have lower GDP, on average, than the more rule of law nations.
What a great answer. Other examples of job systems in action are the US military (hiring anybody with an IQ over 85 to reduce official unemployment numbers) and NASA (carefully placing jobs in all states to ensure political support).
Private companies are full of job systems as well. People hired to make their manager look good and justify larger budgets for example. You can walk into most companies and fire most of middle management and the company will end up more profitable and efficient as a result.
> Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't.
Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations.
You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed?
And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.
Of course hotels can attract people from other sectors if they choose to pay ridiculous wages (like $100/hour). That observation is true but not necessarily useful.
Sometimes other perspectives are more useful. Maybe the shortage is real and the reason for it is cultural. In some places, hotel housekeeping is seen as temporary work. It's something people in specific demographic groups do for a few years before moving on. If there are fewer people in those groups than there used to be, or if those people have found better opportunities, there may be a shortage. In such situations, raising wages may not be an effective way of attracting new workers. If people think people like them don't do certain jobs, they may be reluctant to take such jobs.
With hotels, worker shortages have probably exposed that many hotels were doing things like in person checkin and daily room cleanings that guests would often just as soon not pay for. At some hotels, cleanings were already optional in exchange for giving you some points (or even explicitly charged for). Hotels can certainly pay more. But automating or eliminating unvalued services makes sense too.
Those people driving for those gig apps often value the flexibility of not having a set schedule. I don't think that style of work is very compatible with hotel housekeeping.
Some do, some don't. On the margin, higher pay incentivizes people to compromise their preferences.
As a silly example, imagine if all hotels started paying $200 an hour to their cleaning staff. I think we can probably all agree that they would be flooded with workers and have no shortage at all.
Given that there is a shortage now, we can infer that there's a pay point between the current prevailing wages and $200/hr that would cause enough people to want to work in hotels to solve the staffing issues regardless of people's preferences.
Even with benefits you're probably still going to get royally screwed if you're a housekeeper or anyone with a low paying job that offers benefits. When your deductible is $6k or more and max out of pocket is sky high you're screwed when it comes to a health emergency especially if you're already living paycheck to paycheck. Even with the most basic insurance the US health care system will rake you over the coals and leave you with debt.
They also get paid reliably. Gig apps advertise for workers, in part, by touting their fast reliable payouts. Hotel cleaning is often contracted out to shady operators.
> Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
doesn't get at the point of this:
>> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow!
In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us.
That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.
>>Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough
No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough.
Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations.
My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.
This is assuming that hotels are making enough money to be able to afford to pay more. If margins are thin, they have to increase prices or reduce expenditures in order to get more money. A hotel is not a license to print money; it has to come from somewhere.
This can resolve itself in many ways. The classical outcome is that some hotels go out of business, and the supply of hotel rooms drops to the point where the demand means that a more realistic price level can be reached.
The potentially better outcome is that smaller business that rely on non-wage workers (like family-run businesses) can effectively employ "workers" at a much lower rate in the hopes of outlasting the contraction of the hotel room market.
The worse outcome is that big corporations can allow certain markets to lose money, because they are drawing sufficient income from other markets, and wait out the first culling, which will disproportionately affect local hotels that both rely on wage workers and do not have a capital backstop.
Or, the market can just recover organically due to circumstances completely out of the hotel's control -- the local labor market could contract meaning that workers are willing to take a lower salary, or the tourist market could expand meaning they can book more rooms, or business expenditures for hotel rooms could increase faster than price levels overall.
You also have the lever demonstrated in this article. You institute more automation, self-service, and cut back on services (like daily room cleanings) that a lot of customers don't really value.
Yes, agreed, this method can work, but it isn't magic. I kind of lumped that in with "cost cutting", because in almost every case it results in a lower quality of service. Supply and demand operates on the margins; even though a lot of customers don't value the services, enough might to cut into your income, at least over time, and risk sacrificing some customer goodwill.
Oh. I agree self-service, for example, can either be generally better than dealing with a person (e.g. getting cash at an ATM) or something of a mixed bag (self-service checkout). However, cutting back on room service seems like a general win especially if you'll service rooms on request. After all, there's such a thing as serviced apartments that explicitly only service once a week unless you pay for more.
Hotels would be happy to pay everyone more if customers would happily pay more for a room. The parent is providing an example of how their company categorically won't pay more.
Speaking for my org personally we have zero debt, and are cash positive largely because policies like a hotel expense cap that prevent sales people from draining to company coffers
If I buy a farm/restaurant/hotel/retailer for top dollar and complain about cost of wages making it unprofitable, the problem isn’t the wages. But you’re stuck with your acquisition price, so you’ll lobby for lower wages and make no mention of your sunk costs.
This is likely true. I just read a report that said that the shortage highly correlates with the reduction of immigrants due to COVID and the tightening of immigration into the US. It may not be the only factor, but it is one that contributes to the shortage of service workers.
Like it or not, new immigrants are more likely to take jobs that pay less as compared to non-immigrants.
This means that in the past it was possible to reliably get people to work on the H-2B visa, and now you can't. Additionally, those "out of work" meant that people had to leave and start over reducing the pool of H-2B visa workers.
There has been no tightening of immigration. In particular, illegal immigration is higher than it's ever been [1]. And illegal immigrants are far more likely to work in the hotel industry as cleaners.
There was never any slowdown. Briefly during the initial covid scare and briefly after Trump's election, but neither pause lasted more than a few months.
You can also say that tight immigration leads to automation. Companies will do their best to find ways to reduce costs and increase profits. So limiting immigration will not necessarily lead to wage growth.
Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
> You can also say that tight immigration leads to automation. Companies will do their best to find ways to reduce costs and increase profits. So limiting immigration will not necessarily lead to wage growth.
That's fair, but technically I didn't say it would lead to wage growth. My point is that loose immigration allows capital to keep wages at their current levels, or lower them, because it's still probably better for those immigrating here than from where (whence?) they emigrated.
> Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
But is immigration the only solution to this problem? I get that birth rates are low, but it seems like that's due in large part to having kids being really expensive, on top of everything else being really expensive due to inflation. I don't get why we don't incentivize americans to have more kids. I get that orban is a controversial figure, but his plan [0] seems like a good thing for a government to do for its citizens. Why does helping families have to be a right-wing policy?
Norway have had monthly payments to all parents until kids turned 18, very high parental leave, low caps on fees for nurseries (around 300 usd/month), and most of these have support across the political spectrum.
All told, the value adds up to tens of thousands in support per child, and yet it's nowhere enough to keep fertility rates at replacement. As such I doubt Orbans policies will as well.
I would suggest a read of The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions on US Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery - https://www.nber.org/papers/w30589 and reconsider that position.
In America. Elsewhere, hotels have been much cheaper for a long time. Even well before the pandemic, it was much cheaper for me to stay in hotels in Japan or western Europe than anyplace in America.
Immigration only inhibits wage growth when unions and workers rights are obliterated to the point that they can't fight back against corporations and make them pay a living wage to everybody. Don't act like immigration = wage growth being inhibited, that is absurdly fatalistic about there being no alternative to the status quo.
However you feel about immigration there's no doubt that we need more people to do some jobs. We are not making enough people. If you don't like immigration, get busy and start making some kids.
The solution to this in Canada seems to be to allow a lot of immigrants from poorer countries, willing to live two to a bedroom. Fast food places, Walmart, and other places are now fully staffed thanks to that policy. I know for a fact that it's the case, because in my town it's a very large demographic change from recognizable ethnicity where 5 years ago there was almost none. Unfortunately Canada is a a very expensive place to live, and living 2 to a bedroom is how they can make the pay work.
I have noticed this, too, in numerous different cities and towns throughout Canada, over the same time period that you mention.
This approach hasn't been good for anyone involved.
The employees typically seem quite miserable, as would be expected given their circumstances.
Economically, this approach also significantly increases demand for supply-constrained housing, health care, infrastructure, and goods. This in turn exacerbates Canada's current inflation problem, and it's made worse by these imported workers not offering any real (in the economic sense) productivity gains to help offset the increased demand.
The combination of these factors, plus cultural differences, seems to have resulted in a steep decline in the customer experience at such establishments over that period of time, too.
I now spend a small fraction of what I used to at such businesses because the experience is typically poor, at least relative to what it was in the past. I know others who have changed their spending habits, too, for the same reason.
The payback is over generations. Children of immigrants historically have higher fertility rates and higher participation in the workforce. Someone seems miserable at work but they’re living for their grandkids.
This isn't a solution, its just hurting people who have been so hurt other places that this comparative hurt is less bad. How twisted is it that you see this as a solution? The solution is workers joining together to enact leverage over the wealth horders in society and demanding better wages for everybody. The money is absolutely there in rich countries like the US and Canada.
If it eases your mind I do not support these policies. I think it's the height of hypocrisy that the leftist parties in my country support this. But it is what it is. Our leader has the support of office and managerial class in this country.
It's not like I can change someones thinking, when they see themselves as God's gift to the world. Though, I leave, next time they try and mandate I inject myself with drugs to protect their lard-ass.
> Hotels have raised hourly wages by 25% since early 2020, and employers are offering greater flexibility in scheduling. Still, workers are nowhere to be seen.
I dunno, my pay sure hasn't gone up by 25% in the past 2 years.
What was it up from? If for example they offered the US federal minimum wage in 2020, and the shift hours were unreliable and inflexible, then I could imagine even an extra 25% wouldn't make it worthwhile.
The article says up from $10. I don't know whether that's a decent wage in the US, but it sounds low and $16 is just barely above the proposed compromise new US minimum wage figure, so it sounds not-hellish but not "do it just for the money" level.
Also, I noticed they said "25%" but $10 to $16 is 60%, and if you're griping and can say "we raised by 60% and nobody bit!", then you say that instead of "we raised by over 25% and nobody bit!". So I'm skeptical of the figures - maybe that 60% is best-case or something, and most people are offered $12.50 or something.
Would you work for $16/hr with no health insurance? Hotels are notorious for not only not offering steady 40 hour employment but sending staff home if room count is low or calling people in with minimal notice.
I stepped away from the professional world and am working retail for 15/hr while I get my shit sorted out. This only works due to the following factors:
1.) I have zero commute expenses. I live a five minute walk from work.
2.) I have state provided healthcare independent of my employment, which most Americans can't get. I'm only eligible because I have a severe disability.
3.) I live in a LCOL area. We're still under 1k for a two bedroom apartment and houses can be had for ~100-150k.
4.) I have some professional contacts/a network with higher incomes that can help me out if I need it and don't abuse the relationships.
We're still struggling a lot. If you're going to be homeless with or without a job, why bother with a job?
If we ignore the low pay, physically demanding work, bad benefits and and unpredictable work schedule, then yeah I guess these jobs sound great for moms.
Physically demanding? What's the difference between cleaning a hotel room and cleaning your house or bedroom? There's absolutely zero heavy lifting. You change the sheets, vaccuum and wipe down everything.
I would option to say taking care of kids is more physically demanding than cleaning.
If it's just supplementary income it wouldn't really matter about benefits as the spouse would already have benefits.
Zero breaks, for one. And no ability to take sick days/stop doing it if you're injured. Doing work for 1-2 hours a day or a few hours a week is very different from doing it for 20-40 hours a week. (Much like there's a difference between taking on a project or two for a small team that requires some programming and being a full time dev). Oh, and you can't sit. That's like saying anybody who mows their lawn would have no difficulty in a landscaping position.
And the kid thing it strongly depends on the age and type of kid. Kids at the most physically exhausting ages also tend to take naps which gives the parent a respite. You can also trade off with the other parent/other relatives if you're tired. Can't do that with work: Your coworkers aren't going to do your job if you have an off day.
The physically demanding part is in the demand for physical consistency.
C'mon man. At least have a serious argument. You act like a person cleaning a hotel room can't stop to use the bathroom or take a few moments to collect themselves before starting on the next room.
Have you ever stayed at a hotel? The staff moves at a normal rate, there doesn't appear to be a rush, they aren't sweating through their clothes. I've seen staff in their phones, texting, changing their music.
Not in room cleaning - I was a dishwasher - but yes, I know how it works.
If you think 3 minutes in the bathroom is the same as an actual break, it's not. They appear not to be in a rush because they have to set a sustainable pace. That doesn't mean it's not difficult, especially for females. Many things that are easy for males physically are a PITA for us.
Being on your feet all day and bending over to scrub a toilet is physically demanding relative to a project manager sitting in front of their laptop. Yes it's not as physical as working in a moving company, in a steel mill, or as a home health aide who lifts disabled people. "If you've got time to lean you've got time to clean."
There's not always a spouse with a good job. When the employment market is in favor of employers people just have to accept shitty jobs. In tight labor markets these low wage no benefit jobs are hard to fill and current workers at an establishment don't lose much by quitting for greener pastures. Even with a spouse who has benefits through work, many employers don't subsidize family benefits. Their solution is a "spousal surcharge."
The rate it’s gone up is a red herring. If people don’t want to take the job at the posted rate then they are underpaying.
Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
There are almost certainly miserable working conditions, bad hours, and still an overall low wage. If people are able to find better jobs, then hotels need to treat people better or pay more to offset that.
Are we seriously going to cry about megacorps not getting away with paying workers trash wages for miserable jobs? Boo hoo, pay more.
> If people don’t want to take the job at the posted rate then they are underpaying.
Well, that's why they're going to robots I guess.
> Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
I worked a much worse factory job for years. I don't blame people for not wanting such a thing, but sometimes it isn't all about pay, either. You couldn't pay me to go back to my old job.
It's a bit of both, though it looked like the robots were roombas or something. And I think the cleaning would only matter on longer stays, since I believe they'd still have to turn over the room between guests.
From this article and others that I have read, it is also about work/life balance. Pay is getting better in some places and that gives options. Previously those working 14 unsociable hours a day seemed to be either highly paid execs or lowly paid service workers (yes, a generalization). I imagine that the latter have jumped at the chance to move into the comfortable middle that a lot of HN readers occupy. Many economies have relied on significant numbers of people having no choice but to accept bad pay, conditions & hours and it'll take time to adjust but they really should. Everyone should be able to have a good work/life balance and be paid adequately for a full day's work.
Looking at europe i think it's an actual shortage of workers which leads them to pick (or hold on for) better jobs, and this is the new normal now, and you can't fix it with immigration either
It's not a shortage of underpayable workers. The workers are still there. The problem is that it's illegal to hire them at all because of minimum wage. They've been priced out of the market and low margin employers can't afford them. Many at the bottom are unable to do anything except beg for help from others if they're not employable at wages that employers are willing to pay.
This, in the article they complain that they already raised pay from $10/hour to $16/hour. In Baltimore, where minimum wage is currently $12.50 according to the DOL.
"To keep the employees they do have, the couple tries to accommodate staff needs" yeah, that's what good employers should have been already doing before.
Or an overabundance of educated, nonworking people who don't feel the need to do what they consider menial labor, because they don't need the money; likely because they're either still living with their boomer parents or said parents departed and left them with a bundle.
I'm actually not even sure that's it. What do you get with the tokens you're paid in? The ability to participate in society. There's no longer a society to participate in though as all the social institutions have been deconstructed. Marriage, land ownership, religion, tradition, real communities, family is still nominally there but there's little left of it. It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work (and is that something you even want?) so it's not happening.
Note that this isn't the first time in history this has happened.
> Marriage, land ownership, religion, tradition, real communities, family is still nominally there but there's little left of it.
Curious about where you live and where you grew up? I ask because none of these rings true for me. Many of my friends have bought homes and started families, along the way, they’ve created their own traditions, and are part of communities where they know their neighbors. And this isn’t in just in one place in the country.
> If you want to see the canary in the coal mine, try befriending someone who works in the service industry.
I have a couple of very close friends in the service industry.
They are less well off than others I know and it’s reflected in their lives (still renting, fewer vacations), but no signs of societal collapse (have families and community relationships) there either.
Service industry doesn’t necessarily mean poverty wages. For hotel housekeeping and similar it probably is though.
Had a friend making about $50k waiting tables depending on the year in a city you’d likely never heard of before switching to sales.
Another working in a kitchen planning to buy a home soon.
I know a couple local bartenders who do much better than I expected for a neighborhood bar.
Met a guy years ago who was a school janitor and for whatever reason I always thought they would be poor. Turns out that’s a pretty good job.
That said, none of these people work as a cashier at McDonald’s or hotel room cleaner either. The one making $50k worked at a national steakhouse chain, not a fancy one but a step up from Applebees.
Yeah, you didn't mention their families though. And regardless divorce rates are way up.
If the incentive to work is "yeah you can show up and nothing will go wrong." Great. The same thing happens if you don't leave your parent's basement/subsidized housing/your friend's couch and you won't have to put up with as much crap or pay for a car. Do you see why people aren't bothering?
I’m not sure this is true anymore. The median American will never be able to afford their own home at current housing prices. Sure, we have a higher gdp per capita, but it doesn’t buy us the things we actually need like housing, health care, etc.
Perhaps what’s needed is to bring back family homesteads, but that doesn’t feel like much progress.
I'd say the difference between those times is the feeling of agency/possibility of a good life (defining good life by what that meant at the time). Objectively, material conditions were worse, but due to a variety of factors, the average person felt that society was getting better. We'll put up with a lot of shit if we think it's temporary or something that we could change.
And some people honestly liked living like that. My great-great grandparents lived until the 1980s (born in the 1870s) and refused to get indoor plumbing. People are weird and sentiment matters.
Meaningless, no, because we're hairless chaos apes living in hives of other hairless chaos apes and plenty of our fellow apes live their lives based on this subjective measure which means it needs to be considered in governing and managerial decisions.
I want to add that the current feeling the country is getting worse, in my opinion, is pushed by right wing media.
One of the main themes of conservatives is that then is better than now as well as holding back change their supporters push the notion that things are getting worse (regardless if it's true or what specifics) to help them get elected
The right are open about pushing 'it's worse than it's ever been'. The left prefers to memory-hole history and combine that memory hole with thought terminating hyperbole: They like to present threats completely divorced of historical context.
(I worked in political communications and spent a couple of years getting lists of stories and headlines from all sides of the aisle fed to my email.)
One example of this is all the fear-mongering the Dems/their media arms do around things like abortion rights or queer rights/safety. (And before anybody comes for me, I'm a lesbian so I'm impacted by both.) Like apparently I'm supposed to be constantly terrified by the backsliding on both. And they do concern me but like I grew up in the 90s? I personally remember things being worse and I wasn't curled up in a ball throwing money at the Dems to Save Me. (And speaking of memory holing, as a gay millennial I remember quite clearly how long it took for the Dems to get behind gay marriage: Let's not pretend the current socially progressive planks are anything other than realizing we're a voting bloc that can be pandered to as hard as the MAGA people. I have no doubt the Dems would throw queer people under the bus tomorrow if it were a more viable electoral strategy to do so.)
Finland is in the top position in the world happiness report in 2022. Followed by Denmark and Iceland in second and third place. Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Israel and New Zealand, were among the top 10 'happiest' countries in the world [1].
Except for Israel wouldn't you say though counties have some of the lowest religious participation? What about nationalism?
I'm not trying to prove the opposite of you view as this doesn't show causation but I think it sufficiently counters your view
Obviously there are plenty of individuals where this isn't the case (and there are plenty of people working hard) but the discussion is about the movement of the group and this does appear to be where things are going on both sides.
Not OP, but I think the term "movement" was meant to mean the percentage of people who are starting families, keeping their religion, owning homes, etc. is moving downward. Pew Research has plenty of evidence for this movement downward.
BEFORE the pandemic most americans couldn't afford a $400 emergency bill, people are pretty desperate in the US on average and if you don't encounter that day to day you are living in comparative luxury.
I recently transitioned from long term NEET to full time work and this is hitting me hard. I just end up sitting at home alone playing video games all weekend anyway. What's the point of working the other five days? Especially if the work isn't enjoyable.
Some degree of support network, and when you get paid dirt and the cost to work is high itself (buying and maintaining a car being the big one) the tiny amount of money you get for a huge mental and physical toll just isn't worth it?
You are likely still going to be entirely dependent upon that support network job or no job. Jobs that are available to most people dont generally pay a living wage anymore, is that not sinking in for you?
I am trying to learn here so I am asking these questions with genuine curiosity.
When you say "support network" - I hear that as "friends and family" or some sort of community support (eg: church?) Is that what you mean?
And if so, is it "fine" to not work and thus be a bigger burden on this network? Meaning, even if a role doesn't pay a "living wage", there's a big difference between just living on your friend's couch and eat their food (or whatever) and being able to work and contribute say $2K/month towards your friend for the favor they are doing you?
Nowadays, you can't make any demand if you don't work because of a choice of yours.
workers (should) have unions, the ability to go to strike, and the political position to ask better
The anger of the general public is moving on from high unemployment rates to low wage for workers.
- Have no job ? Nobody cares anymore since service industry needs a workforce (even if you're qualified in any other field)
- Have an underpaid job ? You can have a political impact nowadays.
Also, jobs allow you to have better jobs in the future. You build experience, and working in some companies, like Amazon, allows you to follow a university course, as mention in OP's article.
If you're not doing this for you, you should just have a job to be able to flip off abusive bosses.
>Jobs that are available to most people don't generally pay a living wage anymore
I don't think it can be a long lasting trend. Check out China, where ppl are protesting. And check out what happens at Amazon in the USA, where the high rate of resignation worries management
https://news.yahoo.com/amazon-burns-workers-quickly-executiv...
OP's article wasn't about choosing between not working and working in hotels, it's about hotel workers who moved on to other industries after a few years of covid. They're no longer available to work in hotels, no matter how you compensate them : they move on and are happy with their new job and lives.
But in your situation, if you have the opportunity to work, you can do it to grow the GDP and make your wage.
You can't just expect that others, who might also dislike their jobs, have to pay taxes to share their salary with you just because you don't want to work.
There are real issues that cause unemployment : real estate that prices out workers in cities with jobs, banks that expect you to have a job before giving you a credit, when you need to afford a license and a car before you start a job, inconsistencies between companies expectations and job seekers, injuries, depression or lack of confidence,...
But being a crybaby about working isn't a reason to piggy back on workers.
I'm not even neoliberal, I'm communist. And I think you should work both for yourself and for the sake of the others.
> There's no longer a society to participate in though as all the social institutions have been deconstructed. Marriage, land ownership, religion, tradition, real communities, family is still nominally there but there's little left of it.
What a strange statement. Could you give some evidence?
> It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work
Uh. They may not starve to death but most would certainly end up living in the street and die early in almost all developed country.
If it's anything like the rest of the country most of those churches are dead and/or irrelevant. Showing up on Sunday, singing, and giving money to poor people isn't religion.
> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
You can't have a shortage of underpayable workers, since a shortage means that quantity supplied is less than quantity demanded at every possible price point.
What it is, is purchasers seeking government intervention in the market to artificially suppress market clearing prices.
I wonder where everyone has gone. The lazy answer is that companies aren't paying enough. But how is it better to sit at home making $0 than working and having an income? How do they afford rent or electricity or pay for car insurance?
The workforce participation rate is still well below pre-pandemic levels. Millions of people just up and left the workforce. It's not as if they are looking for work at the right wage, they simply aren't looking for work at all.
> But how is it better to sit at home making $0 than working and having an income?
I had that very discussion with a co-worker leaving. They told me working wasn't worth their time, and they'd better care for their home, family, themselves etc. instead.
And it wasn't that they were rich or their partner had a high paying job, more that the cost of daycare, private teacher, eating outside every day, work related stuff (clothes, commuting etc.) and their general health and mental impact made it a net negative for them. Working a job they didn't enjoy just didn't make any sense.
The interesting part to me is that the calculus didn't change overnight, it's more because one day they stopped for a while and thought long and hard about their life, and came to that conclusion that was there for a very long time already.
I wonder if being forced to spend more time at home during the pandemic reset people's exceptions.
To your point specifically, we used to be one of those families. Once we had children it did not work out a benefit for my partner to work in the field that she wants to work in (healthcare) as it did not pay enough. The additional net income of a full time job worked out to be about $200/month, which just wasn't worth it.
This changed once we moved country, to one where getting people with children back into the workforce is supported by both the government and companies, with greater flexibility from work and better subsidised childcare.
My assumption is that these workers were absorbed into the economy of work at home - whether to be a homemaker, or to do childcare or eldercare that would previously have been contracted out, at the expense of the salaried worker, now are being done without pay outside of the auspices of the labor market.
> How does one decide “working isn’t worth it” but still magically has these funds?
Most likely because even if, as GP says, their partner doesn't have a high-paying job, their partner doea have a job that clears the minimum necessary for household survival.
they were likely so underpaid at terrible jobs they already had subsidized healthcare, section-8 housing, and know all about food pantries etc.
Going out less, not spending money on childcare, getting rid of extra car, and spending time cooking for self instead of going out - a bad low paying job is easy to lose.
They budget for the whole family, with one “bread winner” remaining.
I’d still expect them to get back to a stable job after their kid grow, but as it was a year or two ago, they just weren’t pulling their weight in the balance.
> ~$2000 a month to live at an absolute minimum. No luxury, no gadgets, just getting by.
Assuming 2000 is what you need as a standard working person, you need less than that in average when you’re in a couple, and the calculus is yet different with kids. When one of the adults stops working, a lot costs shift and it balances out. Gov aids, taxes and other benefits also change depending on your situation.
The whole working Germany comes with close to ~2000$ well. Many poor European countries have enough people living from 300-500$. I could also do that if needed. What’s so expensive in US that you need 2000$? Last time I checked housing in Florida was super cheap by German standards.
C can make up for a lot depending on your network and skills. I'm not particularly well-embedded in my local community and if necessary I could get at least the following things free:
* Car repair work
* Basic healthcare (luckily I have state insurance so I don't need it, but if I did it's possible)
* Home/apartment/other home repair or improvement
* Tailoring/alterations/well-fitting clothing (including free clothes if I ask - even if I don't, I get given clothing on a semi-regular basis)
* Cooking equipment
Now, in return I need to offer some skills (mostly technical, academic, or navigating bureaucracies - skills that are in fairly short supply on the lowest part of socioeconomic ladder), but like I said, I'm not particularly involved so people with more history and social credit can get more stuff taken care of.
I also at one point paid like...50% of market rate for rent because I was willing to be free, on-call childcare for 3 children under the age of 7.
1. If you were near retirement age when the 2020 lockdowns hit (or if you were overdue for retirement), then suddenly you're effectively retired for a couple of months, and you might as well just make it official once the retirement ends.
2. Most people who retire have gotten a few promotions over the decades, so when someone is promoted into the spot of the retiring person, you now have one less unskilled worker as an indirect result.
3. Some people were only working their job because they thought it was a more reliable income compared to starting their own business. If they're laid off without warning, then they start their own business or freelance. Some of them will be successful and earn more than they were being employed for, so they're gone.
4. They were forced to spend time with their families and other non-work stuff, which reminded them of the stuff they actually care about, and shifted their priorities.
5. If any industries are affected by the above, then the higher wages attract workers and the effect ripples through to every industry with unskilled labor. Or at least most of them.
This can't be the explanation. If it were true, the workforce participation rate would be steady. Changing jobs doesn't raise or lower that figure. A person is employed whether they scrub toilets or do brain surgery.
But it's not steady. Literally millions of people have stopped working and looking for work since 2020.
People realized that they didn't need to work shitty jobs. They could Uber part time, or work as a nanny without reporting as a full time employee or cut down on their living expenses or live off of government programs. Just look at how many people live in tents in California.
You can find (more than a year old at this point) articles from bar owners trying to re-hire their old staff. Those people found new jobs, because they had no choice. They couldn't afford to not work for years.
And, unsurprisingly, they wanted more money to return. Restaurants, hotels, and the like, tend to be extra stress for no more pay.
Well, about 1,245,000 of them died [1], and I'm sure there were a substantial number of older working-age people who went for early retirement to reduce the chances of dying from public contact.
I hope this isn't too shocking but a lot of janitorial and housekeeping work is done by retirement aged people who don't have enough money to actually retire.
The other big piece - especially to the hospitality puzzle - is that immigration was substantially reduced. First politically and then due to Covid. If you look at the number of work visas issued by year, we’re short literally millions of immigrants that would be doing much of the grunt work in restaurants and hotels.
That’s what is a massive issue I see in the EU even if it’s underreported; too many people I know cannot work because of long covid. Some tried anyway and burnt out because of trying too hard; now they have 2 problems. Luckily most of them are in NL where you won’t end up in a tent under a bridge, but I think long covid is taken way too light (at least over here).
If by NL you mean the Netherlands: Long covid falls under a weird category which for all practical purposes means you have to fight the UWV nail and tooth to get even the tiniest bit of leeway. Which you can't since working 40h/week to get proper care+benefits is exactly the problem you are trying to avoid. Oh, and the state already said the uwv should stop doing that but they keep going like they always did. (my evidence for this is anecdotal second hand though).
This is the most reasonable explanation. I even know a couple people whose jobs were affected by Covid took the time (and government support) to do a career change.
It happened with the airlines too. When you're without a job for more than a year, people move onto new companies, new careers or just retire early.
Singapore airlines continued to pay their pilots to not fly during Covid, knowing it would be tough as hell to restaff once they opened up. Apparently they rotated them through what little flights were available (cargo predominated) to maintain their skills. Once flights were restarted, they had no problem with staff shortages.
Engineering companies spent all my uni years at fairs to show politicians how they develop business in the area, but lack workers and need assistance from the public services
Fast forward to covid, they wouldn't hire you because they didn't have the projects, they wanted to hire workers with experience, market was tight so you had to understand the pay was low, they could find someone else, ...
So I went to an IT company, they really hired workers.
And I'll stay.
I declined interviews with these engineering companies that called back a few months later. And I can't wait to go back to these fairs to call them liars.
In my place, there is also the same case with restaurants. The government gave them money to continue to exist through covid. But most of them fired workers to use the money to buy new kitchens. Now they're complaining about the lack of workforce, blame unemployment benefits (ironic) and are lobbying to give visas to underpaid foreigners.
> But how is it better to sit at home making $0 than working and having an income?
In one of the young couples in my extended family, the mom recently stopped working because daycare cost more than what she was bringing in. I’ve heard this isn’t uncommon. This doesn’t explain the worker shortage at a macro level, but it’s one example where staying at home might make more sense than working.
Over a million people died of covid. Many more have become permanently disabled. Many of them were retired seniors but among the people who were not, they were disproportionately service workers who couldn’t wfh.
You will note that for the US, approximately 25% of the excess deaths in 2021 were from people 64 and younger.
That is still a large number.
Also note:
> And among high income countries, one notable outlier is the United States, which has a much younger profile of deaths than its income-level would suggest.
That hit minorities, lower income, and "essential workers" harder than other areas. These are the people who are cleaning rooms and working hospitality and service sectors.
95% of COVID deaths are of people above 50 years [1]. I think you need a bit more evidence to support the idea that worker shortage is because workers are dead or disabled.
If COVID deaths severely impacted the number of workers, then their housing should have opened up. Instead we see the housing supply even more constrained and prices rising.
Two big recent reasons for the shortage are retirees and reduced immigration, and the follow on effects of those. For instance, the people you are wondering about that "sit at home" are probably moving in with a relative and helping them. And there's a fair chance that relative retired earlier than planned, or was negatively impacted by covid, or both. Covid hit the old primarily, but that age group was helping out with families and communities, and now they need someone to help them.
And a longer term effect that has been going on has been a general reduction in working age males in the workforce. That one is more complex and worrisome. There's some recent research about them if you google for it.
Anecdata…I took a new job for a decent raise at the beginning of the year. The inflation this year ate up 1/3-1/2 of the raise.
I quit a month ago as the money wasn’t enough for me to move forward in life (VHCOL area), management was all older and I felt they do not want to adjust to 21st century processes, and I wasn’t getting any opportunities to really grow.
I have not applied anywhere yet, I’ve taken a couple trips, been spending time outside, and doing a lot of thinking and a little studying/research.
I have no debt, a decent savings, but not enough for a mortgage or to have kids. Employers don’t have a lot of leverage over me because I’ve never made enough to buy-into those adult things that keep your finances constrained.
I can not work for the next two years pretty easily, although I doubt it will last more than another month or four.
I’m not in FAANG and find most companies don’t have much to offer me compensation wise (in terms of letting me grow in my personal life). Not interested in wasting my life working for all these things in the middle.
If you can’t have what you want in life, that’s acceptable. But why get on that career treadmill for a bunch of stuff that won’t make you happy ?
Due to the cost of living, if costs increase and the wage do not, you just can't keep living in the city and go back to your parents[1]. At that point you are disenfranchised and you go to work only when you need to gift yourself a video game/thing using a part time job. For that style of living you can just skip every job that is not worth (like service industry)
A non-researched guess would be some trifecta of early retirement, lower immigration and gig work.
Gig work would be a more flexible alternative for a secondary wage earner.
- delivery (Amazon/Instacart/Doordash)
- rideshare (Uber/Lyft)
- homestay (Airbnb/Vrbo) cleaning
You can deliver food with a motorbike or regular bike.
I imagine delivering food in an inner city area on a bicycle is actually pretty decent since your expenses are minimal. I see quite a lot of people delivering on e-bikes daily.
Americans - particularly low paid workers - were more stuffed with cash than at any point in history BY FAR due to the stimulus.
In the last couple of months that started to draw down a lot - so I would expect the main reason people are quitting isn't because "minimum wage work isn't worth my time" (I mean, it probably isn't). It's because they actually for once in their lives had the cash to be able to do it.
While a third of COVID-19 fatalities were people using nursing homes and by definition not employed, and the over 65 cohort was 90% of fatalities, hundreds of thousands of people left life as well as the workforce. Some seniors can’t afford to retire or prefer to keep a job. The most dangerous job by virus morbidity was line cook, a service/“essential worker” job.
Then add in those disabled by the virus.
Indirect effects include “not working” people who were incapacitated by the virus who normally babysat their grandkids enabling a parent to work (or they’re sheltering in place instead of babysitting). School closures forced many working parents to quit. People who already had a pre-existing condition or high risk occupation retired early in the face of an unknown virus with early estimates of 2% fatality and 10% for old people (we now know this was inflated due to testing not keeping up with spread). Service workers were laid off and had to move on to other jobs. Many used the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance as runway to a better industry, go to college, or just work less. The prospect of mortality shifted people’s time-money trade off toward working less.
The government restricted immigration and many foreigners who could come did not want to work in a highly infected country.
This is all overlaid on a long term decrease in the workforce participation rate due to baby boomer retirements.
Baby Boomers are retiring. Boomers are the largest working generation for a long while. Gen-X is the smallest of all groups and there aren't enough of them to fill up the positions. Millennials haven't been upto speed to fill the positions Gen-X left open. Gen-Z is just entering the labor force.
There's a huge investment push to rebuild a lot of places, institutions, manufactures in the U.S to secure the supply chain. Those require lots of workers.
There is a take that consistently comes up in discussions like this (and indeed is prominent several times on this post), which says "the problem isn't a shortage of workers, it's that employers don't want to pay workers enough." This seems somewhat limited to me, and there is an alternate explanation I would like to explore.
It seems to me rising cost of labor, while good for the people being paid that rising cost, can actually be bad for society overall, because you some businesses and industries will just disappear when the cost of labor goes high enough. And sure, you can respond that those businesses shouldn't exist if they can't pay workers enough, and yeah, fine. But the result is that we just then don't have those businesses (making society worse off?).
For this hotel example -- maybe cost of labor continues to go up, and it's much harder to automate making a bed than vacuuming a floor, and in 10 years, we all generally stay at hotels where robots vacuum our floors every day, but no one ever makes your bed for you -- that becomes a relic of the past.
I live in NYC, so a more prominent example I think about frequently is how we can no longer afford beautiful stone masonry on all our buildings. When labor was cheaper 100 years ago, it was easier to pay someone to carve stone -- now, not so much.
I want workers to be paid a lot so they can live good lives, but it's worth thinking about what happens to society as cost of labor continues to go up, and why the cost of labor is going up in the first place (Baumol's Cost Disease? Land rent?).
Seems like you are forgetting about laborers getting more of the profits of companies and the inverse of non-profitable or barely profitable companies surviving on artificially low labor rates. You mention “society” as if it is distinct from the laborers, but society consists of these laborers.
Laborers get more of the profits of companies and in turn get wealthier. However, the costs of services in turn go up (due to rising cost of labor), so those laborers (society) cannot actually afford more services (provided by people). Workers can more easily purchase goods which benefit from increasing automation and technology.
So, these workers which are capturing more of the profit can afford to buy fancier kitchen appliances and cook themselves better meals. But, can they all then afford to go out to eat more -- when going out to eat is primarily an endeavor dependent on the labor of others (and thus it becomes more expensive)?
No. I am suggesting that laborers get more of the profits and prices do not rise. Business owners actually get less profit. You keep assuming that business owners can and will just raise prices and the markets will bear it, but this is not always the case.
Let's say there is a masseuse. They use their labor to give massages. They are also self employed, so they own their own business. If the cost of labor rises, the masseuse makes more money from giving massages, but this necessarily means that the price of their massages is going up (the cost of labor and the price of the massage are the same thing). Okay, let's take this one step further.
Let's assume that there is a massage parlor, with masseuses who do not own the business, and that the owner of the business has some profit. Cost of labor goes up, and now the business owner no longer has any profit, and it is earned by the masseuses. Yay! However, what happens if/when cost of labor goes up further, and there is no more profit? Prices will rise.
> You keep assuming that business owners can and will just raise prices and the markets will bear it, but this is not always the case.
I think this is my point actually. Markets won't always bear it. Sometimes they will raise their prices and the markets won't bear it, and then the business will no longer exist, and society won't be able to pay for it. E.g., the business of a hotel that makes everyones beds every day, or the business that builds a beautiful NYC building adorned with hand carved stone across the entire facade.
> Cost of labor goes up, and now the business owner no longer has any profit, and it is earned by the masseuses.
This assumes the incremental cost of labor has eaten up all the profit, which is rarely the case. When it does happen and increases in prices are not supported, the viability of this business model is suspect. Basically, the market does not value the “middleman” business owner that does nothing more than rent space to a masseuse. Are they really even a masseuse business or are they an office space rental company?
> When it does happen and increases in prices are not supported, the viability of this business model is suspect.
I think you and the parent poster are agreeing here. Clearly there are degrees to which profit can be reduced, but if a business isn't growing its own profits at the same time as rising labor costs, then at a certain point the business will be just breaking even. Past that point, there is no alternative besides raising prices or shuttering the business.
This is the OP's point about certain businesses maybe not being viable, but society being worse for it. For instance, maybe hotels in all but the busiest cities aren't supported by the market at higher labor costs. Good in terms of workers not being paid peanuts, but bad for anyone trying to drive across the country (and society as a whole).
> in 10 years, we all generally stay at hotels where robots vacuum our floors every day, but no one ever makes your bed for you -- that becomes a relic of the past.
There are plenty of people today who can't stay at hotels that make your bed because they can't afford to stay at hotels at all.
By the same token, 100 years ago most people couldn't afford decorative masonry on their homes in NYC. Working class people often lived in crowded, poorly ventilated fire trap tenements that have long since been demolished.
There seems to be an unspoken "for the rich" after lots of your statements here "making society worse off... for the rich". As another commenter mentioned, there is a similar error with regard to masonry of buildings. I would urge you to consider that for a majority of history, a majority of people could never afford any of these things that you are concerned with going extinct. These things are luxuries.
I mean, I don't really disagree with you. For sure, most all services have in the history of society been mostly, if not entirely, consumed by the rich. For most of society, most everyone has been poor. If you could afford fancy stonework on your house, if you could afford someone to make your bed, of course you were rich.
The past century has seen an explosion of wealth in the world, with many people coming out of extreme poverty, emergence of large middle class in the US, etc. So, the world has gotten a lot richer. But, what does it mean to be richer?
Some things seem relatively obvious -- people have bigger houses. They get to have things like fridges and vacuums. These are tangible goods, for which the cost has fallen in line with increasing specialization and automation.
I'm saying that I think it's interesting that while a richer world can purchase more goods, it can't necessarily purchase more services, since the cost of labor rises in a richer world. Basically, productivity has to increase for people to be able to purchase the services with the rising cost of labor.
I'm not really concerned with the things I mentioned going extinct -- it's not a huge deal if we don't have stonework on buildings in NYC, and indeed if we can build housing faster than before by way of automation, that's great. But many people have wondered "why can't we build beautiful buildings in NYC like they used to?" and I'm basically saying, I think rising cost of labor is the reason, and it's interesting that this goes hand in hand with becoming a richer society.
I am playing a video game now, where I should run a nation. Most of the game is about making economical tradeoffs. I want a GDP growth, so I have to develop sophisticated industries with higher throughouput. These industries has better margins and can afford better wages. As a result, no one wants to work in agriculture. There are three ways out of it:
1) make agriculture more sophisticated, like automatization, which requires less headcount with higher qualification. It is not easy way, requires lots of gov sposored R&D.
2) make food more expensive. This makes life of everyone worse.
3) import food. This is the easiest way, but you cannot import services (like making beds) - you need to import low-wage workers instead.
So, of course there will be hotels where you have your bed made for you, but those hotels will just be expensive. And, by the way, you may order your masonry to be 3D-printed from cement the way no old day mason can do, but it will be quite expensive too.
Victoria 3. By the way, I fount a 4th way: in certain political circumstances there's an option to subsudize wages in certain parts of economy. But that usually makes everything chaotic, with workforce reassigned and goods prices randomizing.
Somehow I doubt you would accept below market rate pay for your own job for the "good of society". You're a valuable professional, after all! But these laboring drones, why they should understand sacrifices need to be made for society! How selfish of them to ask for reasonable pay!
alternatively, labor is the only good, which other abstractions (like money) should subserve. the whole point of an economic system is to distribute the rewards of labor across people. most systems (outside idealistic communism) acknowledge that resources will be unevenly distributed, and then focus on the fairness (aka social acceptance) of the chosen distribution, as most people accept that we contribute differing levels of value to the world's production, and so in turn, accept that we get differing levels of benefit from it.
you're getting confused between economies not being zero-sum games in the long term (pie grows/shrinks over time) but do approximate them in the short term (distribution of today's pie). the cost of labor is not going up relative to overall productivity but rather is going down relatively. so where does the surplus end up? concentrated in the hands of people who aren't constrained enough to deploy capital efficiently in an economy.
so in the hotel example, capital is going to owners who are using it to gamble on capital itself rather than going to workers who typically spend the money and help the economy figure out where to invest for long term growth (and health of the economy and society). cost disease is not even applicable here, though rents are. the economy is increasingly seeking economic rents, which are inefficiencies in the economy because rents by definition don't produce anything.
Exactly. What's disappointing is that they quote this hotel owner saying the old "nobody wants to work" trope when it's 100% false. They even bring up a conflicting quote a few paragraphs later, but I really doubt when she said that the person interviewing her said "no, you're wrong, and here's why." And it's not immediately and forcefully disproven in the article. It's not a difference of opinion, it's just wrong. It's disappointing it was even printed, honestly.
But this family will go on continuing to pay poverty-level wages for a brutal and thankless job convinced that other people are just lazy.
I'd be curious if the hospitality industry has the margins to pay them more or if this is just greed. If they don't have the margins and $20k-$30k is all that position can make them this is just a job being handed over to machines.
As the article pointed out, people are getting more educated and they're able to sniff out opportunity elsewhere. Jobs like housecleaning don't have a trajectory and possibly can't (though I'm open for refute).
Agreed! It’s not that people don’t want to work, they don’t want to work for $16 an hour, with no benefits, and get discarded on a whim to make the quarterlies look good. I don’t blame them.
It’s not so much a problem as a correction - wages have mostly tracked inflation since the ‘70s (the $15/hr people get paid for menial jobs today sounds glamorous but is roughly the same as the $2/hr I was making at a menial job back then), plus now you have all the issues with the healthcare system being an unworkable mess - thank Richard Nixon for that.
Risk avoidance. Poor people can't economically handle "someone sneezed so you get no income for months". Plenty of low paying jobs never closed during covid and everyone's crowding into them to avoid possible economic disaster.
Normally you fix lack of employees with higher pay, but low pay is baked into the cake they can't pay more and stay in business (which is the step right before going out of business, BTW).
Housekeeping/cleaning is pretty low wage regardless, and the pandemic gave a lot of people an opportunity to get new skills. Not saying they went into tech but almost any industry pays better.
A lot probably also went into industry that pay comparatively the same but offer more flexibility in scheduling.
Amazon warehouses are no picnic, and their attrition numbers show it. But compared to industries that exploit immigrants and where wage theft is common, a warehouse job is objectively better.
A lot of people don't understand how hard it is at the bottom of the labor force.
Gig work is a big one. Gig work is taking a huge bite out of the lower-income + more physical service jobs. You still have no benefits and your pay sucks, but you at least can usually control your hours and you don't need to worry about being penalized/fired for getting sick/needing a few days to care for kids/etc.
How many customers of the hospitality industry prioritize either cleaning staff pay, or how perfectly the room was cleaned, when they are looking at their options for a hotel and deciding who'll get their money?
Reasonable Assumption: Hotel management knows the answer, and makes their decisions accordingly.
This causes unexpected problems. Depending on how it's implemented (and in a "fair" way or not), the housekeeping / cleaning staff object to this sometimes on grounds that they're being deprived of hours of work. So in fact I have experienced at some hotels (off the books of course), the housekeeping staff asking you to not accept the points-for-no-housekeeping option.
It's kind of like the situation I heard a where a new "green"/eco building was being built on campus. The plumbers union objected to the decreased amount of copper pipes being installed and the associated lesser amount of labor they were employed for (due to water saving fixtures, no flush urinals, etc) so the university had to give in to allow all the usual pipes to be installed even if they weren't to be used. (or maybe it was in union anticipation of the eco-solution failing some day and needing to fall back on the traditional plumbing setup).
Ok but I'd still rather have a building built with a bunch of useless copper pipes than have the plumbers union annihilated and then have plumbing get gutted as a good paying job and life... and then have plumbing systems everywhere made by people who hate their job and get paid shit?
That sounds like a recipe for a literal shitstorm.
Many Marriott hotels have been offering 500 rewards points for not cleaning your room for years now. It's all or nothing though, you can't just reduce the frequency of cleaning.
I've stayed in hotels that gave you a choice: a voucher for a drink at the bar or getting your room cleaned (except for the last night). Seems fair to me. I could decide each day if I really needed room service or if I'd rather get a free beer.
> It's not for lack of trying. Hotels have raised hourly wages by 25% since early 2020, and employers are offering greater flexibility in scheduling. Still, workers are nowhere to be seen.
The structural issue is that Covid allowed for the activation energy for people to find better jobs. And possibly cut down on supply of people willing to work hotel cleaning jobs for low pay.
It is probably among the least desirable work. Volatile hours, busiest times are weekends and holidays, literally cleaning up anything from bodily fluids to garbage and dealing with smells.
No one outside of large unionized hotels in big cities is offering a decent salary with predictable schedule. The small franchise hotels have less than 50 employees, so they have no employer subsidized benefits either like access to 401k, public transit credits, or other tax advantaged accounts.
Why has the workforce participation rate cratered? If people simply changed to a better job, that figure would hold steady. Instead it shows us that millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work.
Just 1 percent, 63% to 62%, which could just be aging demographics since a greater and greater proportion of people in America are going to be too old to work, especially for hard labor work like cleaning hotel rooms.
Also, hotels (and other low pay to quality of life at work ratio employers) were already struggling before COVID. COVID just accelerated the inevitable.
Look how much the workforce participation rate has varied over the last 20 years. Only a few percentage points even through massive global recessions. Small percentage changes in this statistic can easily deceive the layman into thinking it's not a big deal.
I do not understand why a change from 63% to 62% is a sufficiently big deal to be able to claim “millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work”, especially when we know a greater and greater proportion of the population is elderly who cannot work.
I admit that is technically true, but due to their use of the word “cratered”, I was reading the phrase to mean that relatively large amounts of people have decided to no longer work (outside of those who have decided to no longer work due to aging out).
Of course, prices are set at the margin, and so if hotels (and other businesses like restaurants and retail) were used to paying the lowest pay to quality of life at work ratio, then I guess it would be accurate to say their problem is a couple million people decided to no longer work, because presumably a greater proportion of those who decided to no longer work would have been from these least desirable to work in businesses.
Which is exactly as it should be. ~Half the country doesn't want them. If that results in hotel stays being absurdly expensive (or perhaps changing laws so that hotel rooms don't need to be cleaned between guests), then so be it. America is democratic, and the people have spoken, so now let them suffer the consequences.
> or perhaps changing laws so that hotel rooms don't need to be cleaned between guests
I do not think there are any laws requiring this. It probably just has not been price competitive enough to hand a customer the housekeeping cart at check in.
Another portion is no longer able to work those jobs (especially service sector jobs where one is required to show up for a shift or get fired). New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work - https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...
> The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job was little changed at 5.6 million in November and remains above its February 2020 level of 5.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job.
> Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of persons marginally attached to the labor force held at 1.5 million in November. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, was 405,000 in November, little changed from the previous month. (See Summary table A.)
It has actually rebounded to 1 percent less than it was prepandemic, and health risks were legitimate reasons for people to not work for a period. Really it shows since 2002 the rate has gone down fairly consistently, show overtime it's worth less and less to work.
The main factor in choosing a job is pay in the end and that's also the main variable when choosing to work or not imo.
Structural issues are basically the rise of AirBNB - hotels with far less regulation / staff coverage. Now probably 99% of that regulation provided real tangible benefits to the customer and or the staff.
I mean if suddenly a competitor arrives in your industry selling the same product, with near zero marginal costs, and half the time they cannot price correctly and are happy to see "any" income there might be issues for your industry.
Edit: oh Ok - structural in the supply of labour. In the UK that is hugely labelled Brexit, but it is interesting to see a problem elsewhere - As others say Covid shock is most likely as people re-evaluate what they are willing to tolerate.
The primary structural issue is that low-income wages have completely stagnated if not fallen with the inflation over the last several decades while wages for mid-upper to ultrawealthy have gone up, dramatically.
The number of places in the US that you can get a 2BR home, rental or owning, on minimum wage is basically non-existent.
We're on the verge of large swaths of the US population effectively becoming serfs. Housing is being snapped up by corporations, banks are jacking their fees and making more and more people "unbankable" forcing them into non-bank situations like payroll-company-run quasi-debit-cards where withdrawing their wages costs money.
Consider this: Elon Musk at peak of his wealth had more money than all the residents of Massachusetts (itself quite a wealthy state) combined, by a significant margin.
We're at a stage where we have what amounts to feudal lords in all but name, complete with their own private security forces going around roughing up people.
> The primary structural issue is that low-income wages have completely stagnated if not fallen with the inflation over the last several decades while wages for mid-upper to ultrawealthy have gone up, dramatically.
This is statistically untrue, though a very popular misconception. Median wages have increased slightly after adjusting for inflation over the past few decades [1]. Minimum wage has wavered a bit since then, but most people are not employed at the federal minimum wage [2].
The funny part of this is that, unlike the actual feudal eras of Europe and Asia, where feudal lords had both wealth and political and military power, these days we have democracy, yet the people consistently vote for these things you're complaining about, and against their own self-interest.
>Consider this: Elon Musk at peak of his wealth had more money than all the residents of Massachusetts (itself quite a wealthy state) combined, by a significant margin.
There is no way this is anywhere near true. The list below alone is probably $100B, and there are 7M people in Massachusetts, including many with net worths in the millions.
There are other limits they are pushing against. I haven't used a hotel for a while now because it just costs more than I can afford. They can put their wages up higher but if it starts cutting in to their sales it's an issue.
Friendly reminder that while businesses are screaming blue-bloody murder about inflation hurting them supposedly because of rising fuel/labor costs, corporate profits have gone up more than forty percent after adjusting for inflation.
The Fed is hard-selling a lie that inflation is due to supposedly skyrocketing labor costs and low unemployment. It's not. It's the ultra-wealthy jacking prices, squeezing the shit out of their workforces, converting everyone they can to "gig" or "contract" workers, and cheapening their services and products like they're trying to get blood out of a stone. The pandemic caused a stunning jump in concentration of wealth.
That's why we have historic numbers of open job positions. The jobs are there, but people don't want them because a)the pay and benefits have been squeezed down to the barest minimums b)the conditions suck c)employers are exceedingly demanding in terms of qualifications.
A perfect example would be the status quo in IT and development. Everyone and their mother and cousin wants to hire a Senior DevOps engineer with three pages worth of skills and two decades of engineering or development skills. Forget "ground floor" opportunities, companies aren't even interested in offering 2nd or 3rd floor opportunities, like bringing in traditional IT infrastructure folks and training them in the transition to cloud-based stuff and devops methodologies.
Go pop open Indeed and surf a bunch of low-level support positions and look at the CVS-receipt-length list of required skills/technologies and the huge list of responsibilities for a position that probably pays $40k in a lower income rural area to $60k if you're lucky in one of the higher COL metropolitan markets.
The fed by raising rates is trying to clean out these low-margin businesses by making them less attractive to investors. This means they will fire workers and stop buying goods which is supposed to bring down inflation.
Think about it, in the current environment, the choice becomes: 1. Invest in a low margin business or 2. just call it a day and buy Treasury bills at historically high interest rates and make a guaranteed state tax free return without having to work.
If entire industries are going bankrupt then it indicates that the service they provide is not economically feasible. The end result is that consumers just have less choice due to reduced services.
To be clear, I mean they could make it work, they just won't do it for cultural reasons. Perfectly happy to pay management and consultants well, but unwilling to even consider it for the rank and file.
Some studies on minimum wage increases have compared businesses across state lines, where one state has increased the minimum and the other has not. At least some of the time, the increase appears to benefit businesses, as they had high employee turnover, and hiring does cost money.
The situation is self resolving though. Either they pay more, or they become unable to deliver the service. Since the companies can’t force people to work there, it’s out of their hands.
Or it’s just a correction following a long boom. Full service, discount pricing, ubiquitous availability, and 10% CAGR in new locations can’t go on forever.
What this labor shortage indicates to me is that a significant number of people are willing to reduce the goods/services they consume, in exchange for having to work less. I'm not certain how COVID/lockdowns precipitated this change, but I'm fairly certain they were directly or indirectly the catalyst.
The world needs big industrial vacuum robots. Why don't they exist? I live in a rather rich condo in Europe yet it's only once a year our vast underground garage is cleaned. In winter there are lakes of dirty water from the snow melting off the wheels, the rest of the year there are layers and tumbleweed-like balls of housedust (looks depressing). The floor itself is almost perfectly leveled and polished - ideal for a vacuum robot. I wish the bots would roam there and clean the mess. We have human jaintors but they only clean the stairs.
For people interested in how this would look, there are some videos on YouTube, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnGpSZmj-cA, where people visit Alibaba's high-tech hotel.
Some cheap European hotels are made like the expensive toilet booths where they basically just hose them down —-no fancy carpeting. All surfaces except the bedding are washable. Makes for easy cleanup and quick turnaround.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, since this is basically the operating model of Ibis Budget (fka Formula 1). Literally everything down to the soap dispensers in the shower is bolted down.
The only places I've heard of that do this are the most budget of holiday parks in the UK. The type of place where the TV is bolted down and you have to pay for your own electricity.
Presumably, bed sheets are so basic that they aren't even listed in the star criteria. Even in youth hostels, you may have to put the sheets on yourself or they might cost extra, but you don't need to bring your own.
I live in Europe and have been to my fair share of hotels (though mainly in northern europe), and have never had to bring my own linnens.
Never heard of it either.
A more honest headline would be “Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to avoid paying competitive wages” since that’s really how a free market is supposed to address shortages, isn’t it?
A free market can address shortages either way. If supply is so low that the prices are uncomfortably high, you expect to see a lot of people finding ways to make do without. If the price becomes so high that everyone finds ways to do without, then you expect the price to drop again until it finds another equilibrium.
I think your phrasing makes a valid point, but what we're seeing is absolutely expected in a free market, not some sort of aberration.
I always assumed the previous frequent room cleanings were more for the benefit of the hotel owner checking up on things than because guests demanded them. So if hoteliers think there isn't very much risk of people trashing their rooms, they don't need to have somebody come in every day.
Yeah it's not like anyone exactly dreams to become a hotel room cleaner. Pointless menial jobs like these need to go. Unfortunately while I do see the profits from this getting taxed and going towards UBI-style services in some parts of the world, in the US it's just gonna be going to the owners with everyone else left to die on the street.
I recently stayed a couple nights at a nice “boutique” style hotel in Philadelphia that has no staff there most of the time. You get in with a keycode or an app (the app didn’t work). It’s sort of like an airbnb, but a hotel.
Presumably they do have staff to clean the rooms, but only between visitors as far as I could see? We never saw any staff. There is a number to call.
I think there is the other side to why hotels are unable to raise wages and therefore are unable to raise prices.
With the introduction of services like Airbnb, the increase in supply of accomodation means that it is very much a consumers market where accomodation is almost indistinguishable is competing purely on price.
This is combined with the fact that the opportunity cost of owning a property for the purpose of short term let is very high. Each night your property is vacant you are unable to resell that night in the future (unless you are doc from back to the future).
I think this all leads to a situation were there is very little a hotel can do to raise wages: raise wages and raise prices then consumers will pick the cheapest practically identical accomodation near by.
Even Japan, a country fairly famous for overemploying people, is doing this.
Hotels - self-service checkin, although you do at least speak to a human at the beginning, and if they're not busy they'll do the whole thing the old-fashioned way
Convenience stores / supermarkets - self-service registers, or self-service payment
Karaoke - self-service sign in and payment, even ordered a beer and was told to open the door, a robot was waiting outside with a beer balanced on its head.
Izakaya - sit down, use a tablet to order everything
I have mixed feelings about it, in the UK I want everything automated, but in Japan their service is so good that I find myself missing it.
I see it as a good thing, in that we really don’t need people for that stuff, so overall it saves time and effort.
I see it as a bad thing when those former people are now unemployed, and also people are lonelier because we don’t have small talk. Those are 2 issues that absolutely need to be addressed. However bad (i.e. low paying and toxic) service jobs and lack of small talk are issues which we seem to be having in general
The craziest part of this to me is all of the business owners who weren't having to work their asses off before, raging about not having a $10/hr labor pool to exploit anymore
I actually rather like the experience in ultra cheap third world places where you can put your own padlock on the door. There's something nice about being able to leave your stuff including valuables around without worrying about random staff coming in.
I gotta wonder how much of a "staffing shortage" they would have if they raised the pay 10-15%. Everywhere else I see claims of employers having difficulties finding and retaining competent employees, it just happens that they're low wage, low respect jobs with unpleasant & unreasonable management. Hotel cleaning staff is probably no different.
For some years, I have taught ESL. One recent student worked on a hotel cleaning crew. She did not particularly enjoy it. She also said that when traveling she always took her own sheets, since she did not trust hotel crews to keep them clean or change them between guests.
maybe they could consider raising wages--for real--to take care of their staffing shortage. $10 to $16 an hour clearly doesn't cut it. $16 an hour is trash, $10 an hour... i don't know what to call it.
Last time I traveled was in Germany in September. Several hotels there offered options for 2-3 nights with no cleaning included, for a discount. They call it "green stay", ironically.
You’d think for new hotels there be a robot vacuum in every room these days. Surely there are enough hotel rooms in the world to get industry vacuum bots to cost less then 10k a pop.
Hotels have gotten by too long on exploiting workers with long hours and low wages. $16 is not a liveable wage and people know that. Market forces go both ways!
I have a cousin who... lots of reasons... but life hasn't gone her way.
She had a kid way too early with the wrong guy. She never had much of an education.
Her main job has been working at hotels as a cleaner, and makes something like $8 / hour.
The work was "on demand" -- the hotels wouldn't even give her regular hours. If they didn't have people staying, they wouldn't call her to show up. But, for $8 / hour, they expected her to be on-call -- even though she only got paid if they called.
It was just so cringe-worthy hearing her talk about what was expected of her to make $8 / hour.
She was only allowed like 15 minutes per room. She was never to talk to guests in the halls, unless they spoke to her first. She was told, "Never make eye contact with guests." One supervisor told her, "Better to just shrug and pretend like you don't speak English if a guest talks to you." My cousin has blonde hair and blue eyes.
The cleaners all got cut loose the moment the pandemic hit. No severance pay or Covid bonuses -- pissed me off knowing these companies were claiming pandemic hardships, and getting bailed out, but not passing assistance on to the employees most in need.
My family had to come together to help my cousin during that time -- and that's what family is for, but her employer sure wasn't there for her the way my employer was there for me.
She's never one to complain, or ask for help, but I know from how excited she got when I gave her a handful of $5-50 gift cards that she's never gotten more than $20 as a Christmas bonus.
The highlight of the job for her was when someone would leave a tip, forget something trivial in the room (a phone charging cable or something they wouldn't call lost and found over), or throw something out and she'd get to keep something she found in the trash. But she said they weren't allowed to keep anything from the rooms any more, even if it had been put in the trash. And they were supposed to report if someone left cash in the room, even if it was clearly a $5 tip. Pretty shitty.
Oh, and the kicker... she worked a lot, she was always on call for a few of the different hotels in her area. But if she made "too much" money she would lose her food stamps. There was an "un-sweet" spot, where if she worked too much it would cost her.
Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story was. It all seemed shitty. Probably best to have robots do more of it.
I spent 7 years in my 20s and early 30s basically living in hotels for work. I have a "lifetime" status with one prominent chain.
I didn't put a lot of thought into the lives of the people who worked these jobs back then. But I probably should have. Anything that seems to good to be true, probably is. Pretty much any time someone walks away feeling, "What good service!" I'm sure there's an army of people being exploited.
Doesn't hotel cleaning have a fairly famous reputation for hiring both legal and illegal immigrants? Could the policies started in Trump's term be part of what's causing this issue?
As a person who used to work for housekeeping department in various London hotels I can tell there's no shortage of labour, there's a shortage for slaves. Hospitality jobs, housekeeping in particular, is modern slavery.
A few years back, hotel workers were complaining that hotels were adding more linens to beds such as bed ruffles, to add "luxury", and expecting workers to do the same number of beds per hour. Now it's payback time.
"During the past decade, hotel operators have
increasingly competed on the basis of the level of luxury of their room offerings. This includes
luxury bedding consisting of oversize mattresses and opulent bed linen, together with other
upgraded room and bathroom amenities.
One industry observer has aptly described the competition to introduce more luxurious
beds and room amenities as the "bed-race." The trend started in the late nineties when
Starwood Hotel Corporation introduced the "Heavenly Bed" at its Westin-branded properties.
Other companies followed suit with their own luxury bedding programs: Hyatt the "Grand Bed,"
Marriott the "Marriott Bed," Radisson the "Sleep Number Bed," Hilton the "Serenity
Collection," and others. Although first confined to upper-end hotels, the new bedding and room
packages are now commonplace throughout the hotel industry.
The new bedding packages are characterized by heavy, plush mattresses weighing in
excess of 100 pounds. They typically feature a bulky "duvet" or quilted comforter, triple
sheeting using flat (instead of a fitted) bottom sheet, up to six pillows on a bed, pillow cases that
fit tightly over plump pillows, and other amenities such as decorative pillows and blankets.
Major players in California's hotel and lodging industry have acknowledged the hazards
that the new bedding packages pose to housekeepers..."
I also select the option not to have my room cleaned each day. I’ll ask someone in the hall for towels if I stay long enough to need them. I’ve wondered if this is easier or harder for them. I try to keep my trash well organized and otherwise make it as easy as I can on the staff after I leave.