Maids Protest Order to Scrub on Knees

A Boston hotel’s recent order that its maids scrub floors on their hands and knees has set the city’s labor-management relations on their ear and forged an alliance of workers and social activists that plans to march on the hotel today.

At issue is a directive at the swank Copley Plaza Hotel telling the 44 chambermaids that they no longer are permitted to use mops. “Please help yourself to as many clean rags as you like for HAND washing floors,” said a notice posted last month at the 393-room hotel.

“A maid is a maid, and that’s just what she has to do,” explained Alan Tremain, president of the company that operates the hotel, in an interview quoted by the Associated Press.

But Domenic Bozzotto, president of the union representing the maids, almost all of whom are black, Latino or Asian, called the order “outrageous,” a throwback to the 19th Century.

Enlisted Women’s Groups

He has enlisted the support of several women’s groups, including the National Organization for Women, along with a 400,000-member AFL-CIO chapter whose members include everyone from hard hats to teachers.

It is a novel coalition in a city better known for anti-busing alliances.

“True, there are racial tensions here,” said Ellen Convisser, president of the Boston NOW chapter, “but this is also a place with a lot of social awareness.”

As leaders planned Thursday for the march by several hundred protesters, the hotel’s owner, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co., said that it owns, not manages, the property.

“We own many properties and can’t manage the day-to-day operations of all property that we own,” said spokeswoman Christine Quarembo.

“Bull . . . ,” said Bozzotto, whose union, Local 26 of the Boston Hotel and Restaurant Workers, has filed a grievance. “Clearly, it’s outrageous, and Hancock cannot be allowed to get away with it. This is 1987. Women have dignity and rights and we can’t let this happen,” he continued in an interview.

“It’s weird that they’re (hotel officials) not embarrassed,” said Nancy Ryan, executive director of the Cambridge Women’s Commission. “I couldn’t believe it. I got 10 calls last night. Everyone everywhere was talking about it.”

Nevertheless, the hotel management company, Hotels of Distinction, was standing firm Thursday. Aimee Burkard, a spokesman, said a training video “shows the maids wiping the floors,” and the Copley Plaza will continue going by the video. “This method of cleaning has proven to be the most sanitary and effective.”

Opponents, however, assert that workers might cut themselves on glass or razor blades and decry knee work as antiquated and unnecessary.

But most of all, they criticized the unseemliness of it, painting a picture of black women crawling on their knees as traveling white businessmen lounge in chairs nearby.

“It’s back to slavery,” said Convisser of NOW.

“It’s degrading,” said Robert Haynes, secretary and treasurer of the 400,000-member Massachusetts AFL-CIO Council, which will send some of its construction workers to the protest.

‘A Dignity Issue’

The protest at the hotel today promises to be a show of diversity as well. Many people have telephoned him, said Bozzotto, adding: “Everybody sees it as a dignity issue.”

Additionally, he and other labor officials said, it is a serious workplace issue, calling attention to two long-standing concerns. One is the treatment of minorities who work mostly in the “back of the house” jobs like porter, maid and cook. The other problem, said labor activists, is the unwillingness of hotels to hire minorities and women for jobs in the “front of the house.” These range from bartender to management.

People at the lower end of the employment ladder “are invisible,” Convisser said, “not just in Boston. Workers everywhere are vulnerable because of their lack of social and economic power.”