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.
I just paid a $250 cleaning fee at a hotel this past week. It was a dog friendly room and I had 2 dogs and stayed for 5 nights. The problem is that I paid a non-refundable $200 pet fee and a $250 cleaning fee, on top of being required to strip the beds and take the trash out to the dumpster myself on top of it.
I could have spent an hour removing dog hair from couches and sweeping it all up but with $450 in cleaning fees alone it’s difficult as a consumer to reconcile doing extra work. Problem is, who does that $450 go to? Somehow I feel like the housekeepers don’t see much of it.