Housekeepers Say They Are Pressed for Time

The coffeepot must be cleaned. The ironing board has to be collapsed. And the iron -- well, that means another trip to the sink to dump out water.

Most onerous is the Heavenly Bed, an elaborately luxurious concoction of sheets, pillows and down blankets that is a trademark of Westin Hotels. The housekeepers have a joke: The Heavenly Bed can be hell to make.

At the Westin Century Plaza and other expensive hotels in Los Angeles, housekeepers say they’re exhausted by heavy workloads, in part because of all the perks and pampering that guests now expect in a first-class room.

Whether cleaning a microwave oven or scrubbing an oversized whirlpool tub, the extra steps add up, say the workers, mainly immigrant women earning about $11 an hour. Some say they routinely skip breaks to finish their daily room quotas.

“They think we can do this in 40 minutes, but in reality it takes an hour,” said Rosie Molina as she lathered up the mirrors and marble walls of a guest bathroom at the five-star St. Regis in Century City. Her quota is 10 rooms a day. “Most of the time,” she said, “you’re running.”

The complaints of physical burnout -- a familiar theme in U.S. workplaces after years of downsizing and productivity gains -- are a central element of prickly contract negotiations between the hotel workers’ union, Unite Here, and nine upscale properties, including the Hyatt Regency, Millennium Biltmore and Westin Century Plaza.

Local union leaders have said they won’t sign a deal without protections that limit room quotas, similar to those won by room attendants in Las Vegas two years ago under threat of a strike. That position reflects a growing militancy among the housekeepers in Los Angeles, who dominate the union here and are among its lowest-paid members.

Their complaints include wage inequities (housekeepers in nearly every other major U.S. city earn more) and health insurance costs (hotels recently started charging $40 a month for family policies, which had always been free).

But workload is the top concern, said Maria Elena Durazo, president of Unite Here Local 11, which represents about 4,800 hotel workers in the region.

“They are at the end of their ropes,” Durazo said. “This is something that’s been festering for years.”

So far, the industry response to union demands has been an emphatic “No.”

John Stoddard, general manager of the Wilshire Grand, one of nine members of the Los Angeles Hotel Employers Council, said the union proposal would raise labor costs at his hotel alone $1 million a year, to $15 million.

And he maintains there’s no need for it.

“By 3:30 [the end of their shift], our housekeepers are done. They’re chitchatting in the linen room, then they come down and punch out,” he said. “That tells me we have not put an unfair burden on them.” He said he regularly checked timecards to ensure that workers were not skipping meal breaks.

Stoddard and other hotel managers claim the workload issue was manufactured by the union to whip up members as they headed into tough negotiations in the spring.

“When you tell somebody, ‘You work too hard,’ people tend to believe that,” said Tim Loughman, managing director of the St. Regis and the adjoining Century Plaza hotels, which employ 650 union workers.

Eight of the workers, observed and interviewed at random over a two-day period, said there was nothing artificial about the problem.

“The work is more and the support is less,” said a 16-year housekeeper as she flung open the drapes of a $300-a-night room at the Century Plaza. “Look at this terrace,” she said, sliding the glass door and ignoring the view of Century City from 15 stories up. “It’s a pigsty.”

Special crews once cleaned the balconies, said the worker, who asked that her name not be printed because she feared retaliation from managers. The crews were cut in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the travel industry went into a devastating tailspin. They were never hired back, she said, and now she does the best she can.

Ditto for water and wine glasses, now washed in the bathroom sink. “Before, they had people come in and vacuum under the beds,” said the married mother of two, wearing Century Plaza’s charcoal gray pantsuit. “Now we do it,” she said. “They bought new vacuums so we could reach.”

Plus, there’s all the new stuff: The coffeepot, iron, hair dryer. The Heavenly Bed. With five pillows, three sheets, a blanket and a cotton-covered duvet, the arrangement trademarked by Century Plaza operator Westin is so elaborate, the company features a diagram of it on its website. “The bed takes the most time,” said the worker, who grimaced as she wrestled with a duvet cover.

The Century Plaza quota is 15 rooms a day. That means an average of 30 minutes per room, plus lunch. By midmorning, the worker was already behind schedule. She consulted a scribbled list of room numbers, then braced herself and set her 300-pound cart rolling down the distinctively curved hallway of the hotel, an architectural landmark.

Her next room was a stay-over, apparently a family mixing business and pleasure. There was a laptop on the desk, a half-empty bottle of wine, kids’ clothes on the floor. On a nightstand sat a copy of the hotel’s environmental policy, which gives guests the option of not having bedding and towels changed, in order to save water.

Loughman, the hotel manager, said the so-called green program helped alleviate some of the housekeepers’ burden. But the worker said it was rarely used, and it hadn’t been used here. She scurried to the cart for an armful of sheets.

Room quotas at the hotels range from 10 to 16 a day, depending on the size of the rooms and level of luxury. The union’s workload proposal wouldn’t change that, but it would force hotel managers to drop a room if six or more are time-consuming checkouts. Credit would also be given for rollaway beds and for cleaning rooms on three or more floors.

Most hotels currently give workers a break on the quota if they clean more than eight checkouts. But the practice has never been written into the master Los Angeles contract. And managers, who face continuing pressures to cut costs, said they didn’t want to start now.

Carl Winston, a veteran hotel executive who now directs the Hospitality and Tourism Management Program at San Diego State University, sympathized. “The pressure from corporate offices to minimize costs has become an absolute way of life,” he said.

First, in the late 1990s, came pressure from Wall Street to boost productivity and profits. Then the terrorist attacks emptied hotel rooms for months, prompting even more drastic staffing cuts. Now business is coming back, but price competition, fostered by the Internet, is intense. That means few workers are being rehired.

“First they cut the fat, then they cut the meat,” Winston said. “Now they’re coming back for the bone.”

He noted that labor costs were among the few expenses that managers could directly control. And because housekeeping is the largest department in most hotels, it is a prominent target.

With the overall head count at hotels down substantially from a decade ago, he said, the workers probably have legitimate complaints.

Hotel managers Stoddard and Loughman, who were interviewed in a conference call, acknowledged that cleaning rooms was tough physical work, but said low turnover on their staffs told them the pace was fair.

“Our top 40 housekeepers have 15 years of seniority or more,” Wilshire Grand’s Stoddard said. “I see our housekeepers every day in our cafeteria, where we provide free meals to all of our associates. They’re a very outgoing bunch. I speak to them on a daily basis. I speak Spanish. We have a one-on-one relationship.”

Molina, the St. Regis housekeeper, agreed that cleaning rooms at a union hotel beat many alternatives available to someone with limited English skills and education. The 30-year-old mother of four said she was not likely to move on anytime soon. “I have so many payments due, so many things in mind for the kids.”

She pulled back a love seat cushion and vacuumed the crease, then ran to the far side of the king-size bed to make sure the radio was still tuned to classical. It was her 10th day running on the job -- a full hotel means plenty of overtime. She was breathing hard, sweating.

“The first months, I lost 30 pounds, without going to the gym or walking outside,” she said. “That’s one good thing about this job.”

There was a knock on the door. In walked Nohelia Ramos, an older veteran housekeeper, wearing the same St. Regis uniform of taupe dress and apron. She carried two vases of flowers for the room. She’s on light duty these days, she said, after surgery on her shoulder.

Ramos pulled back her collar to show a thick, ropey scar, the reminder of an injury that she blamed on the speedup of work. In a rush to finish her quota one day, she said, she slipped on the wet marble floor and fell hard into a giant whirlpool tub.

As Ramos began to play out the scene in the bathroom, Molina let out a shriek. “Ack!” She pointed to a thin, 1-inch black pen line on the duvet cover of the newly made bed.

“Now I have to take it back and get another one,” she said. “If a manager sees this, I get a warning.”

Molina ran down the hall to the service room to grab a replacement. There was no time to waste. She was already behind schedule.