Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages
npr.org
npr.org
I also select the option not to have my room cleaned each day. I’ll ask someone in the hall for towels if I stay long enough to need them. I’ve wondered if this is easier or harder for them. I try to keep my trash well organized and otherwise make it as easy as I can on the staff after I leave.
Too many people are sufficiently dirty that it can easily cause pest issues, as well as other damages.
But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, they will inevitably end up with hoarders and people that keep food lying around and then comes cockroaches and rats and odors, etc.
Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agree with your conclusion (filthy guests who stay weeks invite pest problems) ... so if the big bad old hotel industry needs to market their advantages, maybe there's an Institutuionally Clean angle.
'Should be' yes, but you'd be surprised how many don't follow through on this, and not necessarily due to lack of policy. Cleaning staff have very tight schedules, being allocated only a few minutes to completely clean and setup the room for the new guest but if the old guest didn't follow through on the exact checkout time, then that throws of the schedule of the cleaning staff completely, meaning they often cut corners to meet their deadlines.
The keyword here is "should". I don't have much faith that hotels will actually do this.
Secondly hotels inside of casinos both outside of and including the strip will regularly clean rooms. They also have regular pest control services, as the rooms are high traffic and constantly occupied.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-hotels-revis...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-settlement-m...
> Jim Frantz, whose San Diego-based law firm represents another 199 victims including Romo, said Thursday's settlement is a good first step. Now MGM must strengthen the security protocol at all their facilities, he said.
>"I would assume a responsible business, after going through something like this, would institute the highest level of security," Frantz said, adding that the company should add metal detectors and Navy SEAL-type security guards. "As long as we have automatic weapons, we've got to be on high alert with all our security."
Great if you like paranoia. I guess I am not going to Vegas.
But you don't, really. They're all antiques.
Not just Las Vegas hotels. Any hotel (Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, etc.) with an app that supports digital keys via Bluetooth already have this.
I still like to check in at the counter though if it looks like it isn't too busy. I have elite status at these hotels, and they typically hand out free cookies or water at the counter, and I occasionally get a free discretionary room upgrade on the spot.
I wouldn't go to lengths avoiding installation (just remember to uninstall if it really bothers you), but I'd prefer a purely web based implementation. How about clearing arbitrary NFC UID for access? (From a self-serve counter if taking humans out of the equation is so much of a goal) The credit card form factor is certainly not inconvenient at all, but dealing with them can still be surprisingly annoying when that happens to coincide with oddities from the very long tail of luggage situations.
When I travel, and in the App I provide my Work address and contact info, not my personal info
When checking in at the desk they take my government ID, often scan it into go knows what system or what security, and then replace my Work info with my personal address in their systems
No thank you, I will take the app instead
Makes me wonder how this works when you use digital check-in.
It's true in Europe they often copy your license and, in some countries, I believe there's some registration with the police that the hotel handles.
Maybe they won't upload the list of my installed apps (which can leak information like religion or medical issues), maybe they won't track my location through the entire hotel (or everywhere), maybe they won't snoop on my pictures... but maybe they also will, and I don't like maybe.
Almost certainly I'll have to agree to lengthy ToS that will then be used as justification to inundate me with spam.
The Android permission model is particularly messed up because it changes every few SDK target versions, so it's hard to build a mental model what exactly you're allowing. Many apps that had a built-in photo-taking capability required storage access and wouldn't work without. Any app using bluetooth had to request and be granted location access (because Bluetooth could be used to track location... so any app acting as a key automatically also got to track you via GPS on top of that, and even if the app maker didn't want to they had to request the permission for Bluetooth to work).
I've seen too many companies pushing their apps aggressively and with massive rewards. They're clearly getting something out of it, and probably not something I want to give them. If you're very, very lucky, the main goal is only to make them more "sticky" (make it easier to use them over someone else next time), but that's the thing - I don't want past service providers to stick to me.
Hotels.com might not be a supported OTA however, since they are a consolidator. You can't even get HHonors points with hotels.com.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilton-hilton-honors/1887120...
I do not want a lot of apps on my phone, and I do not want to install something just for one trip.
Parking in my town is largely paid for via an APP — which is frustrating for somebody not using a mobile phone. The coin-accepting meters are rapidly disappearing.
When you leave you just throw the key card into a box or feed it back into the machine.
No smartphone necessary.
I know this is OT: But I am tired of every business I go to bugging me to use their app for everything. I don't want another app to keep track of, and I do not want to get texts all the time.
If I remember correctly one of my hotels I used sent me a pin code or such via email and then they had a self service to get a keycard, which used the pin code.
But people forgot the reason why.
This has always been an option. Put the DND on your door.
The one and only time I stayed in such a place - an intruder was caught entering my room and diddling with a phone I left there - and he only got caught because I happened to double back to get something, and just happened to do so while he was in there.
Never again. And the best part about staffed hotels? "I never have to use my phone, if I don't want to."
You can do that with literally any Hilton hotel anywhere in the country whether it’s a Waldorf or Home2Suites or a Tru. You can share your digital key with up to 4 people.
I don't mind hotel check-ins but the car rental process has never, ever been pleasant for me.
Marriot is starting that program as well
Soo much nicer
I have seen this attitude at more and more people, where does it come from? Meaning not wanting to talk with other people. It's what makes us humans, talking with other people. The alternative is lots and lots of money paid on psychotherapy and the like further down the road, or worse.
Because actively avoiding talking to other people it's like bringing your car for regular checkups every 100k miles instead of ~15-20k miles, which will of course irremediably damage it.
Talking to someone about checking in for a hotel room, after waiting for 10 minutes in a check in line...is not what I would call a fulfilling experience. Communication does not make us human, plenty of other species communicate...there are far more intricate and unique things that make us what we are.
You're equating someone's wish to not have to wait at a check out counter to being anti-social...come on.
Yes, 10 minutes waiting in a hotel lobby, which is by definition a societal space, is, well, social. Actively wanting go avoid that is, well, anti-social.
Anyway, it's a losing battle at this point.
I love parties, deep conversations, etc. but as an introverted person, a day of excessive unnecessary interaction makes those interactions I do enjoy no longer enjoyable, and just a chore. By managing my social energy I am able to be a warm, friendly, and outgoing social person. If you met me at a party you probably would not guess that I’m introverted, because I am not antisocial. Yet, I would be willing to pay a lot more for a hotel room where I don’t have to make small talk at a front desk while checking in.
Ah the epitome of social interactions. An underpaid and overworked service worker mis-hears my name, pretends to not find me in the system then gives me a card. Well worth queuing for!
But you know it is a must, since if I continue the conversation with my travel companion uninterrupted all the way to our room then I am actively tearing apart the fabric of society.
> Anyway, it's a losing battle at this point.
Battle? Why do you care how others choose to live their life this much? Are they hurting you?
Really? That is your position?
Yes, that is my position. Why wouldn't it be? Society is formed of all people, not only acquaintances and friends. Yes, including the hotel receptionist.
> whereby if I do not have it I would need to seek mental health treatment
Yes, when people were not treating people such as hotel receptionists like the other that is not worthy of our attention then we were doing way better on the mental health front.
I fly in. Click on the hotel address on the Hilton app that takes me to Apple Maps and get an Uber to the hotel through Maps. On the ride to the hotel, I do the digital check in, request my digital key and walk directly to the room.
I’m going to be talking to people all day the next day.
However it's nice to do things on your own sometimes. For example I love McDonalds self-checkout because it speaks my language everywhere on the planet, and gives me all the time I need to prepare my order.
On the other, automation concentrates wealth in the pockets of those who finance it. Automated checkout machines do not benefit fast food workers, only investors. What happens when you automate a third or a half of the workforce like that?
I hope that we can share the spoils of all this innovation, because the future will be very bleak otherwise.
Here in Japan, it's entirely different. Customer service people are always polite, so it's always pleasant dealing with them, though westerners frequently complain that such people here aren't "chatty" like Americans; instead they're really efficient and don't waste peoples' time with chit-chat (which in America, frequently seems to result in making people wait longer unless there's only one customer). But I also don't see the segregation in society that I saw in America.
Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't.
Or maybe hotels have to rethink their business models. It's an inevitable consequence of real wage growth that labor becomes more expensive relative to goods and services. At some point, the old ways are no longer viable. Hotels can't hire as many housekeepers as before, because people are not willing to pay enough for hotel rooms. Hotels must then find ways to provide housekeeping more efficiently with less labor.
As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time
Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers. I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs ! I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ?
When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled.
They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything.
That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs. If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value.
(Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)
Funnily enough I had the same thought when I arrived at JFK; compared to EU airports there seemed to be so many people just pointing you in a direction or yelling at you to get in a queue. It struck me that better UX and signage would make those people redundant (literally)
If you see excessive workers in any government run agency, whether it's Willie Brown appointing 100 "mayoral advisors" in San Francisco, or 30 people standing around pointing towards an exit sign at a train station, then you are watching patronage networks in action. It's not like the station can't afford signage, or that those running the station are too stupid to allocate labor efficiently. We should not look down on these countries and their capabilities, they are just stuck in a different equilibrium.
Poor nations, if they could avoid it, would always choose to spend less money per government service delivered, as it would allow them to deliver more service. It's not true that labor is cheap in poor nations. It's cheap for a rich nation, but not for the poor nation. But they are often governed in such a way that in order to obtain and keep power, you have adopt a clientist governance model, which is so common throughout the world, and this is a big reason why the nation in question is poor in the first place.
Then you can ask "Why are nations governed on clientist principles?" And the answer is often related to the nation not having any other "glue" holding people together or incentivizing them to respect rule of law. To support a leader, they want some money in their pocket given to them by that leader. If he says no, another leader will arise that will offer to put that money in your pocket, and then that will be the one you support. The easiest way to give someone money is to give them a job where they get paid for doing very little. This continues in the private sector -- you are opening a tourist hotel and need good relations with a local notable. Well, he will expect that you hire many of his relatives or supporters. Then those supporters have a reason to support that leader -- because again he puts money in their pocket. The result is a different view of labor -- where jobs are given to people based on who they know and which patron is looking out for them. Such a system provides great stability -- Rome was built on these types of patronage networks. They may even be the oldest form of labor organization around -- the idea that random people should be hired based solely on whether they were needed or had qualifications -- that's a relative new, and in some sense dehumanizing way of looking at labor. In a clientist model, a jobs are assigned based on relationships.
To counter this requires a strong cultural opposition to seeking this type of self-interest, and very few nations or regions have this. Even the U.S. was plagued by clientism after the large migration waves at the end of the 19th Century, as many cities became run by various machines that catered primarily to those ethnic groups that followed clientism in their native lands. It was what they expected from a leader in the old country, and so it was carried over here. Those old machines turned out to be incredibly hard to dismantle, requiring almost a century long struggle, and in many cities like San Francisco or Philadelphia, these machines are still in operation. So this is not at all related to the GDP, except for the fact that clientist nations tend to have lower GDP, on average, than the more rule of law nations.
Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations.
You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed?
And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.
Sometimes other perspectives are more useful. Maybe the shortage is real and the reason for it is cultural. In some places, hotel housekeeping is seen as temporary work. It's something people in specific demographic groups do for a few years before moving on. If there are fewer people in those groups than there used to be, or if those people have found better opportunities, there may be a shortage. In such situations, raising wages may not be an effective way of attracting new workers. If people think people like them don't do certain jobs, they may be reluctant to take such jobs.
Ah, "people like them". You might try thinking through the who and the why here. Then you'll get to the "useful" part.
> Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.
doesn't get at the point of this:
>> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.
For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow!
In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us.
That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.
No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough.
Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations.
My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.
If your wage goes up 10% but inflation is 11%, you actually have a real wage decrease. Generally speaking anyway.
Like it or not, new immigrants are more likely to take jobs that pay less as compared to non-immigrants.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
These are temporary and are at most 3 years. There is similar "if you don't have a job, you leave."
Add in the 2016 through 2020 was less favorable to immigration.
While past years, we haven't hit the visa cap for H-2B (like we do for H-1B), in 2022, applicants hit the cap ( https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/10/12/dhs-supplement-h-2b-cap-... https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/14/the-u-s-is-nearly-dou... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/04/1134417921/could-foreign-work... )
This means that in the past it was possible to reliably get people to work on the H-2B visa, and now you can't. Additionally, those "out of work" meant that people had to leave and start over reducing the pool of H-2B visa workers.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-arrests-hit...
Also, the employee shortage will only get worse as the number of older american increases and number of working age employees shrinks. If it's bad now, it's only going to get worse as time passes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washi...
However you feel about immigration there's no doubt that we need more people to do some jobs. We are not making enough people. If you don't like immigration, get busy and start making some kids.
This approach hasn't been good for anyone involved.
The employees typically seem quite miserable, as would be expected given their circumstances.
Economically, this approach also significantly increases demand for supply-constrained housing, health care, infrastructure, and goods. This in turn exacerbates Canada's current inflation problem, and it's made worse by these imported workers not offering any real (in the economic sense) productivity gains to help offset the increased demand.
The combination of these factors, plus cultural differences, seems to have resulted in a steep decline in the customer experience at such establishments over that period of time, too.
I now spend a small fraction of what I used to at such businesses because the experience is typically poor, at least relative to what it was in the past. I know others who have changed their spending habits, too, for the same reason.
I dunno, my pay sure hasn't gone up by 25% in the past 2 years.
The article says up from $10. I don't know whether that's a decent wage in the US, but it sounds low and $16 is just barely above the proposed compromise new US minimum wage figure, so it sounds not-hellish but not "do it just for the money" level.
Also, I noticed they said "25%" but $10 to $16 is 60%, and if you're griping and can say "we raised by 60% and nobody bit!", then you say that instead of "we raised by over 25% and nobody bit!". So I'm skeptical of the figures - maybe that 60% is best-case or something, and most people are offered $12.50 or something.
Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.
There are almost certainly miserable working conditions, bad hours, and still an overall low wage. If people are able to find better jobs, then hotels need to treat people better or pay more to offset that.
Are we seriously going to cry about megacorps not getting away with paying workers trash wages for miserable jobs? Boo hoo, pay more.
"To keep the employees they do have, the couple tries to accommodate staff needs" yeah, that's what good employers should have been already doing before.
Note that this isn't the first time in history this has happened.
Curious about where you live and where you grew up? I ask because none of these rings true for me. Many of my friends have bought homes and started families, along the way, they’ve created their own traditions, and are part of communities where they know their neighbors. And this isn’t in just in one place in the country.
What a strange statement. Could you give some evidence?
> It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work
Uh. They may not starve to death but most would certainly end up living in the street and die early in almost all developed country.
You can't have a shortage of underpayable workers, since a shortage means that quantity supplied is less than quantity demanded at every possible price point.
What it is, is purchasers seeking government intervention in the market to artificially suppress market clearing prices.
The workforce participation rate is still well below pre-pandemic levels. Millions of people just up and left the workforce. It's not as if they are looking for work at the right wage, they simply aren't looking for work at all.
Very peculiar.
I had that very discussion with a co-worker leaving. They told me working wasn't worth their time, and they'd better care for their home, family, themselves etc. instead.
And it wasn't that they were rich or their partner had a high paying job, more that the cost of daycare, private teacher, eating outside every day, work related stuff (clothes, commuting etc.) and their general health and mental impact made it a net negative for them. Working a job they didn't enjoy just didn't make any sense.
The interesting part to me is that the calculus didn't change overnight, it's more because one day they stopped for a while and thought long and hard about their life, and came to that conclusion that was there for a very long time already.
To your point specifically, we used to be one of those families. Once we had children it did not work out a benefit for my partner to work in the field that she wants to work in (healthcare) as it did not pay enough. The additional net income of a full time job worked out to be about $200/month, which just wasn't worth it.
This changed once we moved country, to one where getting people with children back into the workforce is supported by both the government and companies, with greater flexibility from work and better subsidised childcare.
The point OP is making us these people probably need ~$2000 a month to live at an absolute minimum. No luxury, no gadgets, just getting by.
How does one decide “working isn’t worth it” but still magically has these funds?
Most likely because even if, as GP says, their partner doesn't have a high-paying job, their partner doea have a job that clears the minimum necessary for household survival.
(Which is often less than $2000/person-month.)
Going out less, not spending money on childcare, getting rid of extra car, and spending time cooking for self instead of going out - a bad low paying job is easy to lose.
I’d still expect them to get back to a stable job after their kid grow, but as it was a year or two ago, they just weren’t pulling their weight in the balance.
> ~$2000 a month to live at an absolute minimum. No luxury, no gadgets, just getting by.
Assuming 2000 is what you need as a standard working person, you need less than that in average when you’re in a couple, and the calculus is yet different with kids. When one of the adults stops working, a lot costs shift and it balances out. Gov aids, taxes and other benefits also change depending on your situation.
A) Their partner or family works
B) Welfare
C) Informal economy
There's also the 4th but unlikely in this case
D) Investments
1. If you were near retirement age when the 2020 lockdowns hit (or if you were overdue for retirement), then suddenly you're effectively retired for a couple of months, and you might as well just make it official once the retirement ends. 2. Most people who retire have gotten a few promotions over the decades, so when someone is promoted into the spot of the retiring person, you now have one less unskilled worker as an indirect result. 3. Some people were only working their job because they thought it was a more reliable income compared to starting their own business. If they're laid off without warning, then they start their own business or freelance. Some of them will be successful and earn more than they were being employed for, so they're gone. 4. They were forced to spend time with their families and other non-work stuff, which reminded them of the stuff they actually care about, and shifted their priorities. 5. If any industries are affected by the above, then the higher wages attract workers and the effect ripples through to every industry with unskilled labor. Or at least most of them.
Those are some of the causes.
There's also the toll COVID took on the workforce, and COVID-related disabilities.
But it's not steady. Literally millions of people have stopped working and looking for work since 2020.
And, unsurprisingly, they wanted more money to return. Restaurants, hotels, and the like, tend to be extra stress for no more pay.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Sep 2015 labor force participation rate: 62.4%
August 2022 labor force participation rate: 62.4%
It happened with the airlines too. When you're without a job for more than a year, people move onto new companies, new careers or just retire early.
Singapore airlines continued to pay their pilots to not fly during Covid, knowing it would be tough as hell to restaff once they opened up. Apparently they rotated them through what little flights were available (cargo predominated) to maintain their skills. Once flights were restarted, they had no problem with staff shortages.
In one of the young couples in my extended family, the mom recently stopped working because daycare cost more than what she was bringing in. I’ve heard this isn’t uncommon. This doesn’t explain the worker shortage at a macro level, but it’s one example where staying at home might make more sense than working.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/too-young-die-ag...
You will note that for the US, approximately 25% of the excess deaths in 2021 were from people 64 and younger.
That is still a large number.
Also note:
> And among high income countries, one notable outlier is the United States, which has a much younger profile of deaths than its income-level would suggest.
That hit minorities, lower income, and "essential workers" harder than other areas. These are the people who are cleaning rooms and working hospitality and service sectors.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-tota...
And a longer term effect that has been going on has been a general reduction in working age males in the workforce. That one is more complex and worrisome. There's some recent research about them if you google for it.
I quit a month ago as the money wasn’t enough for me to move forward in life (VHCOL area), management was all older and I felt they do not want to adjust to 21st century processes, and I wasn’t getting any opportunities to really grow.
I have not applied anywhere yet, I’ve taken a couple trips, been spending time outside, and doing a lot of thinking and a little studying/research.
I have no debt, a decent savings, but not enough for a mortgage or to have kids. Employers don’t have a lot of leverage over me because I’ve never made enough to buy-into those adult things that keep your finances constrained.
I can not work for the next two years pretty easily, although I doubt it will last more than another month or four.
I’m not in FAANG and find most companies don’t have much to offer me compensation wise (in terms of letting me grow in my personal life). Not interested in wasting my life working for all these things in the middle.
If you can’t have what you want in life, that’s acceptable. But why get on that career treadmill for a bunch of stuff that won’t make you happy ?
[1]https://www.npr.org/2022/12/11/1139330863/genz-millennials-l...
Gig work would be a more flexible alternative for a secondary wage earner. - delivery (Amazon/Instacart/Doordash) - rideshare (Uber/Lyft) - homestay (Airbnb/Vrbo) cleaning
I imagine delivering food in an inner city area on a bicycle is actually pretty decent since your expenses are minimal. I see quite a lot of people delivering on e-bikes daily.
In the last couple of months that started to draw down a lot - so I would expect the main reason people are quitting isn't because "minimum wage work isn't worth my time" (I mean, it probably isn't). It's because they actually for once in their lives had the cash to be able to do it.
Then add in those disabled by the virus.
Indirect effects include “not working” people who were incapacitated by the virus who normally babysat their grandkids enabling a parent to work (or they’re sheltering in place instead of babysitting). School closures forced many working parents to quit. People who already had a pre-existing condition or high risk occupation retired early in the face of an unknown virus with early estimates of 2% fatality and 10% for old people (we now know this was inflated due to testing not keeping up with spread). Service workers were laid off and had to move on to other jobs. Many used the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance as runway to a better industry, go to college, or just work less. The prospect of mortality shifted people’s time-money trade off toward working less.
The government restricted immigration and many foreigners who could come did not want to work in a highly infected country.
This is all overlaid on a long term decrease in the workforce participation rate due to baby boomer retirements.
There's a huge investment push to rebuild a lot of places, institutions, manufactures in the U.S to secure the supply chain. Those require lots of workers.
There're just a shortage of labor everywhere.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/18/it-pays-not-to-work-in-bidens-...
It seems to me rising cost of labor, while good for the people being paid that rising cost, can actually be bad for society overall, because you some businesses and industries will just disappear when the cost of labor goes high enough. And sure, you can respond that those businesses shouldn't exist if they can't pay workers enough, and yeah, fine. But the result is that we just then don't have those businesses (making society worse off?).
For this hotel example -- maybe cost of labor continues to go up, and it's much harder to automate making a bed than vacuuming a floor, and in 10 years, we all generally stay at hotels where robots vacuum our floors every day, but no one ever makes your bed for you -- that becomes a relic of the past.
I live in NYC, so a more prominent example I think about frequently is how we can no longer afford beautiful stone masonry on all our buildings. When labor was cheaper 100 years ago, it was easier to pay someone to carve stone -- now, not so much.
I want workers to be paid a lot so they can live good lives, but it's worth thinking about what happens to society as cost of labor continues to go up, and why the cost of labor is going up in the first place (Baumol's Cost Disease? Land rent?).
Laborers get more of the profits of companies and in turn get wealthier. However, the costs of services in turn go up (due to rising cost of labor), so those laborers (society) cannot actually afford more services (provided by people). Workers can more easily purchase goods which benefit from increasing automation and technology.
So, these workers which are capturing more of the profit can afford to buy fancier kitchen appliances and cook themselves better meals. But, can they all then afford to go out to eat more -- when going out to eat is primarily an endeavor dependent on the labor of others (and thus it becomes more expensive)?
There are plenty of people today who can't stay at hotels that make your bed because they can't afford to stay at hotels at all.
By the same token, 100 years ago most people couldn't afford decorative masonry on their homes in NYC. Working class people often lived in crowded, poorly ventilated fire trap tenements that have long since been demolished.
The past century has seen an explosion of wealth in the world, with many people coming out of extreme poverty, emergence of large middle class in the US, etc. So, the world has gotten a lot richer. But, what does it mean to be richer?
Some things seem relatively obvious -- people have bigger houses. They get to have things like fridges and vacuums. These are tangible goods, for which the cost has fallen in line with increasing specialization and automation.
I'm saying that I think it's interesting that while a richer world can purchase more goods, it can't necessarily purchase more services, since the cost of labor rises in a richer world. Basically, productivity has to increase for people to be able to purchase the services with the rising cost of labor.
I'm not really concerned with the things I mentioned going extinct -- it's not a huge deal if we don't have stonework on buildings in NYC, and indeed if we can build housing faster than before by way of automation, that's great. But many people have wondered "why can't we build beautiful buildings in NYC like they used to?" and I'm basically saying, I think rising cost of labor is the reason, and it's interesting that this goes hand in hand with becoming a richer society.
1) make agriculture more sophisticated, like automatization, which requires less headcount with higher qualification. It is not easy way, requires lots of gov sposored R&D.
2) make food more expensive. This makes life of everyone worse.
3) import food. This is the easiest way, but you cannot import services (like making beds) - you need to import low-wage workers instead.
So, of course there will be hotels where you have your bed made for you, but those hotels will just be expensive. And, by the way, you may order your masonry to be 3D-printed from cement the way no old day mason can do, but it will be quite expensive too.
And I always wonder why we agree that market price is solution to everything except when it comes to labour...
you're getting confused between economies not being zero-sum games in the long term (pie grows/shrinks over time) but do approximate them in the short term (distribution of today's pie). the cost of labor is not going up relative to overall productivity but rather is going down relatively. so where does the surplus end up? concentrated in the hands of people who aren't constrained enough to deploy capital efficiently in an economy.
so in the hotel example, capital is going to owners who are using it to gamble on capital itself rather than going to workers who typically spend the money and help the economy figure out where to invest for long term growth (and health of the economy and society). cost disease is not even applicable here, though rents are. the economy is increasingly seeking economic rents, which are inefficiencies in the economy because rents by definition don't produce anything.
But this family will go on continuing to pay poverty-level wages for a brutal and thankless job convinced that other people are just lazy.
As the article pointed out, people are getting more educated and they're able to sniff out opportunity elsewhere. Jobs like housecleaning don't have a trajectory and possibly can't (though I'm open for refute).
I was in Vegas last month and they were advertising something like $12-13/hr for hotel cleaning jobs. In Vegas! Bonkers.
Normally you fix lack of employees with higher pay, but low pay is baked into the cake they can't pay more and stay in business (which is the step right before going out of business, BTW).
A lot probably also went into industry that pay comparatively the same but offer more flexibility in scheduling.
A lot of people don't understand how hard it is at the bottom of the labor force.
How many customers of the hospitality industry prioritize either cleaning staff pay, or how perfectly the room was cleaned, when they are looking at their options for a hotel and deciding who'll get their money?
Reasonable Assumption: Hotel management knows the answer, and makes their decisions accordingly.
(I don’t care for intermediate cleanings when I stay, just at the beginning personally).
If I stay in a place for a couple of weeks, I’d be happy to have the bedsheets and towels changed once and the room made like every 3 days at most.
I mean, most of us don’t do more than that at home. Less room cleaning would save on staff and laundry et be a net benefit for the environment.
Hotels have, in many cases, just stopped having daily room cleaning, without offering a discount:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hotels-end-basic-amenities-no-m...
It's kind of like the situation I heard a where a new "green"/eco building was being built on campus. The plumbers union objected to the decreased amount of copper pipes being installed and the associated lesser amount of labor they were employed for (due to water saving fixtures, no flush urinals, etc) so the university had to give in to allow all the usual pipes to be installed even if they weren't to be used. (or maybe it was in union anticipation of the eco-solution failing some day and needing to fall back on the traditional plumbing setup).
Conflicting incentives...
Of course that's just on paper. In reality one person pockets the profit and they eat dirt.
That sounds like a recipe for a literal shitstorm.
25% of minimum wage isn't much.
It is probably among the least desirable work. Volatile hours, busiest times are weekends and holidays, literally cleaning up anything from bodily fluids to garbage and dealing with smells.
No one outside of large unionized hotels in big cities is offering a decent salary with predictable schedule. The small franchise hotels have less than 50 employees, so they have no employer subsidized benefits either like access to 401k, public transit credits, or other tax advantaged accounts.
I mean if suddenly a competitor arrives in your industry selling the same product, with near zero marginal costs, and half the time they cannot price correctly and are happy to see "any" income there might be issues for your industry.
Edit: oh Ok - structural in the supply of labour. In the UK that is hugely labelled Brexit, but it is interesting to see a problem elsewhere - As others say Covid shock is most likely as people re-evaluate what they are willing to tolerate.
The number of places in the US that you can get a 2BR home, rental or owning, on minimum wage is basically non-existent.
We're on the verge of large swaths of the US population effectively becoming serfs. Housing is being snapped up by corporations, banks are jacking their fees and making more and more people "unbankable" forcing them into non-bank situations like payroll-company-run quasi-debit-cards where withdrawing their wages costs money.
Consider this: Elon Musk at peak of his wealth had more money than all the residents of Massachusetts (itself quite a wealthy state) combined, by a significant margin.
We're at a stage where we have what amounts to feudal lords in all but name, complete with their own private security forces going around roughing up people.
This is statistically untrue, though a very popular misconception. Median wages have increased slightly after adjusting for inflation over the past few decades [1]. Minimum wage has wavered a bit since then, but most people are not employed at the federal minimum wage [2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0203127200A
There is no way this is anywhere near true. The list below alone is probably $100B, and there are 7M people in Massachusetts, including many with net worths in the millions.
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/these-are-the-16-riches...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/inflation-hasnt-been-bad-f...
https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-...
etc
The Fed is hard-selling a lie that inflation is due to supposedly skyrocketing labor costs and low unemployment. It's not. It's the ultra-wealthy jacking prices, squeezing the shit out of their workforces, converting everyone they can to "gig" or "contract" workers, and cheapening their services and products like they're trying to get blood out of a stone. The pandemic caused a stunning jump in concentration of wealth.
That's why we have historic numbers of open job positions. The jobs are there, but people don't want them because a)the pay and benefits have been squeezed down to the barest minimums b)the conditions suck c)employers are exceedingly demanding in terms of qualifications.
A perfect example would be the status quo in IT and development. Everyone and their mother and cousin wants to hire a Senior DevOps engineer with three pages worth of skills and two decades of engineering or development skills. Forget "ground floor" opportunities, companies aren't even interested in offering 2nd or 3rd floor opportunities, like bringing in traditional IT infrastructure folks and training them in the transition to cloud-based stuff and devops methodologies.
Go pop open Indeed and surf a bunch of low-level support positions and look at the CVS-receipt-length list of required skills/technologies and the huge list of responsibilities for a position that probably pays $40k in a lower income rural area to $60k if you're lucky in one of the higher COL metropolitan markets.
Many industries seem to prefer going bankrupt than pay their lowest level employees well.
Think about it, in the current environment, the choice becomes: 1. Invest in a low margin business or 2. just call it a day and buy Treasury bills at historically high interest rates and make a guaranteed state tax free return without having to work.
Some studies on minimum wage increases have compared businesses across state lines, where one state has increased the minimum and the other has not. At least some of the time, the increase appears to benefit businesses, as they had high employee turnover, and hiring does cost money.
You can save a lot of money by not eating out, going out, etc. and just staying home and playing a board game with the family.
* Lots of places don’t care if their garage is an unclean space.
* Places that do care will hire cleaning staff that are probably cheaper.
* Liability concerns for having something semi-autonomous roaming around peoples’ expensive vehicles.
It’s not for everyone of course.
I’m not trying to brag but I’ve been to all seven continents of this world and many places in Europe. Never once have I seen this.
Presumably, bed sheets are so basic that they aren't even listed in the star criteria. Even in youth hostels, you may have to put the sheets on yourself or they might cost extra, but you don't need to bring your own.
Did you have some weird experience that you’re extrapolating wildly?
Its different for hostels tho
I think your phrasing makes a valid point, but what we're seeing is absolutely expected in a free market, not some sort of aberration.
Presumably they do have staff to clean the rooms, but only between visitors as far as I could see? We never saw any staff. There is a number to call.
With the introduction of services like Airbnb, the increase in supply of accomodation means that it is very much a consumers market where accomodation is almost indistinguishable is competing purely on price.
This is combined with the fact that the opportunity cost of owning a property for the purpose of short term let is very high. Each night your property is vacant you are unable to resell that night in the future (unless you are doc from back to the future).
I think this all leads to a situation were there is very little a hotel can do to raise wages: raise wages and raise prices then consumers will pick the cheapest practically identical accomodation near by.
Hotels - self-service checkin, although you do at least speak to a human at the beginning, and if they're not busy they'll do the whole thing the old-fashioned way
Convenience stores / supermarkets - self-service registers, or self-service payment
Karaoke - self-service sign in and payment, even ordered a beer and was told to open the door, a robot was waiting outside with a beer balanced on its head.
Izakaya - sit down, use a tablet to order everything
I have mixed feelings about it, in the UK I want everything automated, but in Japan their service is so good that I find myself missing it.
I see it as a bad thing when those former people are now unemployed, and also people are lonelier because we don’t have small talk. Those are 2 issues that absolutely need to be addressed. However bad (i.e. low paying and toxic) service jobs and lack of small talk are issues which we seem to be having in general
These hotel owners can get fucked
Home sweet home is a so much better experience than being in a hotel, even the more expensive ones.
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/self-cleaning-toilets-do-th...
Assuming annual inflation of 8%, that is a reduction in real wages over three years.
She had a kid way too early with the wrong guy. She never had much of an education.
Her main job has been working at hotels as a cleaner, and makes something like $8 / hour.
The work was "on demand" -- the hotels wouldn't even give her regular hours. If they didn't have people staying, they wouldn't call her to show up. But, for $8 / hour, they expected her to be on-call -- even though she only got paid if they called.
It was just so cringe-worthy hearing her talk about what was expected of her to make $8 / hour.
She was only allowed like 15 minutes per room. She was never to talk to guests in the halls, unless they spoke to her first. She was told, "Never make eye contact with guests." One supervisor told her, "Better to just shrug and pretend like you don't speak English if a guest talks to you." My cousin has blonde hair and blue eyes.
The cleaners all got cut loose the moment the pandemic hit. No severance pay or Covid bonuses -- pissed me off knowing these companies were claiming pandemic hardships, and getting bailed out, but not passing assistance on to the employees most in need.
My family had to come together to help my cousin during that time -- and that's what family is for, but her employer sure wasn't there for her the way my employer was there for me.
She's never one to complain, or ask for help, but I know from how excited she got when I gave her a handful of $5-50 gift cards that she's never gotten more than $20 as a Christmas bonus.
The highlight of the job for her was when someone would leave a tip, forget something trivial in the room (a phone charging cable or something they wouldn't call lost and found over), or throw something out and she'd get to keep something she found in the trash. But she said they weren't allowed to keep anything from the rooms any more, even if it had been put in the trash. And they were supposed to report if someone left cash in the room, even if it was clearly a $5 tip. Pretty shitty.
Oh, and the kicker... she worked a lot, she was always on call for a few of the different hotels in her area. But if she made "too much" money she would lose her food stamps. There was an "un-sweet" spot, where if she worked too much it would cost her.
Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story was. It all seemed shitty. Probably best to have robots do more of it.
I spent 7 years in my 20s and early 30s basically living in hotels for work. I have a "lifetime" status with one prominent chain.
I didn't put a lot of thought into the lives of the people who worked these jobs back then. But I probably should have. Anything that seems to good to be true, probably is. Pretty much any time someone walks away feeling, "What good service!" I'm sure there's an army of people being exploited.
A few years back, hotel workers were complaining that hotels were adding more linens to beds such as bed ruffles, to add "luxury", and expecting workers to do the same number of beds per hour. Now it's payback time.
"During the past decade, hotel operators have increasingly competed on the basis of the level of luxury of their room offerings. This includes luxury bedding consisting of oversize mattresses and opulent bed linen, together with other upgraded room and bathroom amenities. One industry observer has aptly described the competition to introduce more luxurious beds and room amenities as the "bed-race." The trend started in the late nineties when Starwood Hotel Corporation introduced the "Heavenly Bed" at its Westin-branded properties. Other companies followed suit with their own luxury bedding programs: Hyatt the "Grand Bed," Marriott the "Marriott Bed," Radisson the "Sleep Number Bed," Hilton the "Serenity Collection," and others. Although first confined to upper-end hotels, the new bedding and room packages are now commonplace throughout the hotel industry. The new bedding packages are characterized by heavy, plush mattresses weighing in excess of 100 pounds. They typically feature a bulky "duvet" or quilted comforter, triple sheeting using flat (instead of a fitted) bottom sheet, up to six pillows on a bed, pillow cases that fit tightly over plump pillows, and other amenities such as decorative pillows and blankets. Major players in California's hotel and lodging industry have acknowledged the hazards that the new bedding packages pose to housekeepers..."
[1] https://www.dir.ca.gov/oshsb/documents/Hotel-Housekeeping-Mu...