Parking a link: the economics of labor

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 10:49 pm by Jane the Actuary

Parking a link: the economics of labor 2015-02-26T22:49:13-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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According to today’s Tribune, Starwood Hotels has piloted a new program that allows its guest to decline, not just fresh towels daily, but the entire housekeeping service, for up to three days in a row, in reward for a credit towards food or drinks, or extra frequent-customer points. (It’s promoted as a “green” initiative, because of the water and electricity savings — from not mopping floors and not using a vacuum, I guess — but, of course, it’s primarily a cost-savings initiative.) And the housekeeping employees aren’t happy.

Reasonably enough, they claim that the rooms then become dirtier when they are cleaned, and require more work to clean, while the company hasn’t adjusted its daily quotas, so that “they were experiencing more pain and discomfort in their legs and backs because they were more physically taxed cleaning dirtier rooms.” Also, “housekeepers have been reprimanded for not cleaning rooms fast enough and some have resorted to working through breaks to avoid warnings.” And, to be sure, I don’t know the mechanics of this sort of thing: if workers are paid on an hourly basis, but likewise have a quota, does the employer have the right to require them to stay late (and if so, paid or unpaid) to finish? If the employee finishes early, do they get their full day’s pay? One doubts they have a bonus system, since this is, after all, a staff of unionized housekeepers. Or is this all about reprimands which add up to termination — and, if so, one presumes that the hotel would find it impractical and inefficient to set up a system in which each employee, in turn, is reprimanded and fired, and new employees hired and trained.

But that’s all a matter of how they run their business and manage their employees.

What’s more interesting is the other thing the housekeepers and their union are protesting: the number of hotel guests electing to forgo room-cleaning service has been so significant that employees have been terminated, their services unneeded. Hence:

More than two dozen women and Unite Here organizers carrying small mops and colorful dusters quietly marched Friday into the lobbies of the Sheraton, W and Westin hotels to deliver a letter calling for the program to eliminated — or at least changed to one that doesn’t result in job losses.

It is the nature of businesses to look for ways to cut labor costs. And those same businesses have no moral or legal obligation to employ a fixed number of workers if they can find a way to be profitable with lower expenses. Conceivably, the union and the hotel could agree to cut all employees’ hours evenly, but it seems to me that, historically, unions have been skeptical of such ideas, too.

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