Strikes Start At Top Hotel Chains

With up to 17 rooms to clean each shift, Fatima Amahmoud’s job at the Moxy hotel in downtown Boston sometimes feels impossible.

There was the time she found three days’ worth of blond dog fur clinging to the curtains, the bedspread and the carpet. She knew she wouldn’t finish in the 30 minutes she is supposed to spend on each room. The dog owner had declined daily room cleaning, an option that many hotels have encouraged as environmentally friendly but is a way for them to cut labor costs and cope with worker shortages since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unionized housekeepers, however, have waged a fierce fight to restore automatic daily room cleaning at major hotel chains, saying they have been saddled with unmanageable workloads, or in many cases, fewer hours and a decline in income.

The dispute has become emblematic of the frustration over working conditions among hotel workers, who were put out of their jobs for months during pandemic shutdowns and returned to an industry grappling with chronic staffing shortages and evolving travel trends.

Some 10,000 hotel workers represented by the UNITE HERE union walked off the job Sunday at 25 hotels in eight cities, including Honolulu, Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Seattle. Hotel workers in other cities could strike in the coming days, as contract talks stall over demands for higher wages and a reversal of service and staffing cuts. At total of 15,000 workers have voted to authorize strikes.

“We said many times to the manager that it is too much for us,” said Amahmoud, whose hotel was among those where workers have authorized a strike but have not yet walked out.

Read full story at NBC News.