The Pooper: The Hyatt Regency Boston, Hyatt Regency Cambridge, Hyatt Harborside @ Logan International Airport
The Poopee: About 100 housekeepers earning ~$15/hour plus benefits
The Corporate Poop: “As part of an ongoing drive to address challenging economic conditions, the Hyatt hotels of Boston have restructured their housekeeping services…Regrettably, the restructuring included staff reductions.’’
The Straight Poop: The Boston Globe has a breathtakingly appalling article today about the corporate pooping on 100 housekeepers employed by three Boston-area Hyatts. According to the article, the Boston Hyatts needed to cut costs. Sadly, this kind of story is not a surprise in today’s economic environment.
As an ex-employee of one of the largest hotels in the world, I understand the pressures hoteliers are under to cut costs. One of the most interesting things about the front-line employees I met like housekeepers and food service staff was how many of them were veterans of the property, having worked there sometimes for decades, despite the frequent changes in ownership experienced by the hotel. In the wake of the recent economic downturn, I, along with many manager level employees were cut, as well as a few senior executive managers and a few front-line people. However, the ones who have a ton of seniority tend to stay because when you operate a hotel, you need a certain minimum level of staffers to operate the hotel. You need to have a certain number of cooks to provide a minimum level of service in the restaurants. You need a minimum level of housekeepers to clean rooms. Management might take some extreme tacks, shutting down entire hotel towers, etc. to enable them to cut staff and other ancillary costs even more, but at the end of the day, you need a skeleton crew to keep things going at a hotel.
What’s interesting about this story is that these Boston-area Hyatts took an alternative tack to the usual strategy of cutting staff where possible but maintaining a few staffers. They decided to replace their entire housekeeping staff, about 100 in total, with a much lower-paid contracted workforce from outside the company. It appears that the old housekeeping staff, which once made about $15/hour with full health, dental and 401k benefits, will be replaced with contractors making $8 per hour.
So far so good. Sounds like your garden variety “corporate-layoff-in-modern-times” scenario. What was spectacular about this? Well, the old housekeeping staff was asked to train their replacements before they were notified of their dismissal, innocently told by management that they were just training employees that would fill in for them when they went out on vacation. On August 31st, the housekeepers, some with at least two decades of time in at their properties, were cut loose, with two weeks of severance for each housekeeper plus an additional week of severance for every year of service they had, up to five or ten years depending on the property.
There is something truly spectacular about lying to your employees to trick them into training their replacements, then cutting them loose as soon as the job is done. It was almost like a professional hit – they never saw it coming, and it was brutally efficient.
In the story, the housekeepers were not part of any union, though the local hotel workers union has adopted their cause. Now, the hotel where I worked, the housekeepers were unionized. I wonder if these Boston hotel workers were unionized, whether or not they would have been protected from their fates. Maybe it wouldn’t have prevented them from losing their jobs, but perhaps it would have kept them from such an ironic professional demise to their Hyatt careers.
After being laid off from my first job, I understood the basic notion that corporations are not worthy of anyone’s loyalty, though I still believe that you can be loyal to people, such as mentors, in corporate environments. Still, being loyal is fraught with peril – after all, some of the employees in the article had put in two decades with the hotel, undoubtedly making some friends around the hotel in the process. Yet we all know what happened in the end.
The Pooper Scooper: One of the basic things you can do, if you want to punish Hyatt for their acts is to not patronize Hyatts in the future. Whenever you buy a good or service, your money is essentially votes to perpetuate the creation of that good or service; alternatively, boycotting a product is a vote to end that service. Want to do more? Launch an Executive Carpet Bomb. It may also be worth your effort to write directly to the management of the hotel properties. Like all corporate environments, 80% of the job is CYA – “cover your ass.” The focus is often on avoiding situations where you’d make customers angry, rather than creating situations to make them happy. While voicing displeasure to management over this situation isn’t likely to get these housekeepers their jobs back, you can give the perpetrators of such a cruel pooping a headache.
