Read Ebook: Behind the Scenes in a Hotel by Consumers League Of New York City

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The following example illustrates how unintelligently an interview can be carried on by a housekeeper who was apparently an excellent manager of her department in other respects. The bad psychology and entire lack of employment technique in the interview is obvious. The interview took place in a first class hotel of a first class city in New York State. The girl waited for three-quarters of an hour outside the linen room. Finally, the housekeeper, a robust, emphatic person, came up the stairs. The girl took the initiative:

"Are you the housekeeper?"

"Yes," in a forbidding tone.

"Do you need any chambermaids?" She gave the girl an appraising look. She seemed to suspend judgment temporarily.

"Why, yes," she replied ungraciously, "I do need a steady girl. Are you a floater?"

"No, I'm not a floater," was the quick reply suggested to the girl. The housekeeper looked skeptical, but went on.

"Where've you worked?"

"Oh," and she registered faint satisfaction, "that's the same management as this hotel," then, hardening again, "and did you get tired of that?"

"Oh, no," replied the candidate, quick to get her cue, "I liked it. I had to leave when we moved away from there." The housekeeper was mollified.

"You live here now?"

"Yes, I'm goin' to. I ain't got any people. I come from Lake George," showing she was a floater after all.

"You sure you ain't a floater and you'll come Sundays, every Sunday and take your night watches?" suggesting to the girl that she will expect her to be skipping Sunday and watches. "Well, wages is .50 a week, live out, hours 8-3 with night watch every 20th night from 6 to 11 P.M. When can you start?"

"Tomorrow."

"All right, now don't go back on me, will you?" implying that the girls usually do.

Then, as an afterthought, "What's your name?"

"All right, Minnie, 8 o'clock tomorrow. Now don't you go back on me, mind!"

Now that the hotels' employment agency is no longer open, a girl setting out to look for a job in a New York hotel first looks over the "Help Wanted" column in the New York World. There she may find advertisements such as these:

Details are seldom given regarding wages or hours. If she is experienced she has a notion as to which are "good houses" so she rates the hotels in her mind and starts out early Monday morning to apply to them for a job.

Failing to find advertisements in the paper--and she does fail very often, for the labor supply in hotels is abundant--she makes the rounds of hotels, tipped off by a friend as to the best places to work. Or she joins the throng which files in and out of the hotel agencies on Sixth Avenue. The agency is usually on the second or third floor of a building with its sign in the doorway on the street floor. Under the sign are daily bulletin boards where the agency posts the "Jobs Open Today." On the one side are jobs for men, on the other jobs for women. The girl stops to pour over these with a motley crew of women, young and old, trim and slattern, of all nationalities.

"Pantry a Live in girl month

Waitress a Live in month

Chambermaid a Live in," month

she reads. If she finds anything to interest her, she ascends the several flights of dark stairs leading to the agency offices. She finds the employment agency divided into two parts, the men's department and the women's department. Behind a railing at one end is the interviewer of women, seated at a desk, talking to applicants one by one. In front of the railing in groups sit the candidates for jobs. There are neat waitresses, pretty Irish chambermaids, intelligent, mature pantry women, buxom Italian cooks, fat little bathmaids and cleaners, who are beginning to despair of getting a job anywhere. Conversation is animated and loud, often in brogue and broken English. It concerns disputes between housekeepers and maids, the awful hours and food in some hotels, the Irish question, prohibition, and how foreigners are taking girls' jobs.

Finally the interviewer turns and says, "Come on in. What are you looking for?" and she tells the candidate what jobs she has open and that she must obligate herself to pay the agency 10 per cent of her first month's salary if she gets a job through it. Then the girl gets a card from the interviewer directing her to a job. The employment office is not careful to conserve the worker's time or money. It is a commercial institution bent on profit. It sends her out to a hotel which wanted a chambermaid yesterday or early in the morning, without first telephoning to find out if the job is still open. It even "books" her for a job out-of-town with the most meager information regarding conditions in the hotel, although the worker is required to sign a contract to stay for a definite period of time. So she often finds herself, after visiting the agency, with a day lost, carfare lost and nothing gained, or a job secured which she finds it is impossible to keep because of some unknown disadvantages.

The hotel worker reflects, therefore, before going on a job recommended by the agency, deterred also by the 10 per cent fee. She will look around for herself and return here as a last resort. So she goes the round of the individual hotels again. When she reaches a hotel she walks to the rear hunting the employees' entrance. It is not hard to distinguish. It is indicated by an opening in the sidewalk and a steeply descending flight of iron steps, often circular, leading to the basement or second basement. These are often slippery and dark. They lead into an ill-lighted passage at the bottom, littered with storeroom supplies, old bottles, casks, bags of potatoes, etc. She has not made much progress before she is hailed by the timekeeper from his cage behind the time clock near the door.

"Hey, what do you want," he calls, "a job?" Sometimes he is scarcely so civil. She states her errand; she wants a job as a chambermaid, a waitress or a pantry girl, as the case may be. Sometimes she meets absolute discouragement from the timekeeper. Sometimes he is more good-natured and directs her to the housekeeper or the steward and shows her the way to the elevator. So she continues along the passage, dodging puddles and dripping pipes.

If she is a chambermaid, she goes to the housekeeper's office or the linen room. There she sits on a bench outside the door waiting audience along with other applying bathmaids and cleaners,--talking again about how awful it is to work in a hotel. When she does see the housekeeper, she is greeted with a roughly appraising look.

"Hotel experience?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Where?" and "how long?"

But it is her appearance which counts, not her experience. If the candidate is young and nice looking, undeformed, and there is a job open, she will get it. If she is older and getting fat, all the experience in the world will do her no good. Her looks demote her to the bathmaid class and she will find it hard to get a job as that. So she is casual in giving her experience and she is casually hired. She doesn't learn much about the wages and hours or about the food and the room she is to have if she is to live in.

The girl decides to try it out for herself to see if it is "a good house for tips, how much you can pick up from the floor, what the watches are, how hard they work you, and what the grub and rooms are like." If she doesn't make out she'll leave--it doesn't much matter. She would do something else if she got half a chance--but she'll stick to this awhile anyway.

During the first few days in the hotel, she is shoved about and utterly lost. Perhaps no one even asks her name for several days. She doesn't know where her "station" or her "floor" is and how much territory it covers. She doesn't know where the time clock is, where to get her meal ticket, where meals are served, where the toilets and dressing rooms are, where to get supplies and bed linen. She fumbles about "lost like" until she learns for herself. Sometimes she grows discouraged and leaves in the first few days. Sometimes she finds a friend who shows her around, takes her down to lunch, tells her what the rules are, and introduces her to her friends.

There were, of course, a few exceptions. In several cases rules and regulations were posted in linen closets and pantries and occasionally the housekeeper would put a new worker in charge of another girl to learn the rules. All hotels required the new worker to sign a contract stating that she would obey the rules of the establishment and would allow her baggage to be searched. The contracts seemed meaningless in that in most cases the workers had no way of knowing what the rules and regulations of the hotel were.

As for learning her job, "You're experienced, aren't you? Well, then, you know what to do," and the housekeeper dismisses all responsibility. The idea that any woman knows how to do chamber work or cleaning is prevalent in the housekeeping department. The girl is left to work alone, then scolded for her mistakes or even discharged without notice. One worker was turned out at 4 o'clock in the afternoon with no money and another girl put in her bed that night because the housekeeper "didn't like the way she swept." In a few exceptional cases the housekeeper taught the new girls by the "you watch me" method.

The failure of hotels to train their employees was pointed out by the United States Federal Board of Vocational Education which had been requested by the American Hotel Association to make an investigation of the possibilities for vocational training in the industry. The report points out that the hotel industry has developed so fast from a home industry that managers have not perfected their organization. Department heads have not been instructed that one of their functions is the training of new workers. The report stresses the fact that training must be based on a clear definition of jobs and that jobs have not yet been analyzed by the management. "As hotel men pay more attention to training and promotion of deserving employees, there will be greater inducement to capable young people to enter the business. Such opportunities for training and promotion will also lessen the turnover of labor and consequently lessen the cost of operation." In New York State there seems little indication that hotels have profited by this report.

Footnote 3:

L. S. Hawkins, representing the Federal Board of Vocational Education. Vocational Education in the Hotel Business, A Report to the American Hotel Association of the United States and Canada. P. 10.

There was no such thing as a transfer or promotion policy in hotels where work was obtained. The nearest approach to it was found in one hotel where in the housekeeping department women were sometimes taken on as bathmaids at a month and later became chambermaids at a month. There their advancement ceased. Some hotels have rules that no chambermaids may be promoted to linen room workers. There was no cooperation between departments in transferring workers from one department to another.

HOURS

One of the most important conditions of work to the woman hotel employee is the number and distribution of the hours she works. As the hotel industry is a continuous one, most departments operate 18 out of the 24 hours. Within these 18 hours, as has already been pointed out, there are peaks of work when a larger force is necessary. Broken shifts and long and short working days are the result. The working days are made even more irregular by lack of regular lunch periods and regular closing time for those workers who live in the hotel.

The length and distribution of hours is so different for the different departments that it is necessary to discuss the housekeeping department and the kitchen, pantry and dining room departments separately.

Housekeeping Department

The function of the housekeeping department in a hotel is the housing of guests. It has sole charge of the bedroom floors. The function of the women workers in this department is to clean the bedrooms and corridors, to change the linen on the beds, to dust and sweep, supply fresh towels and soap and care for the baths, private and public. The bulk of this work falls in the daylight hours when guests have risen and gone about their business. In the large transient hotels, however, guests are coming into the hotel and leaving it until midnight. Part of the workers must, therefore, be on hand to attend to the incidental wants of the guests and make up new rooms at night.

The women employed in greatest numbers in the housekeeping department are the chambermaids, who clean rooms and make the beds, the bathmaids, who clean and scrub out the bathrooms and corridors and the special cleaners. Of these, the bathmaids' and cleaners' work falls in fairly regular shifts. Bathmaids work a day shift and cleaners, in the big hotels, work a day and a night shift. Chambermaids, on the other hand, have night work distributed among them according to the needs of the establishment.

The work of the bathmaids and the cleaners is, perhaps, the hardest women have to do in hotels. All day long they scrub out wash basins, tubs and toilets, polish brass, and mop up floors on their hands and knees. Their work is of fairly uniform intensity. It is "humiliating work," as one bathmaid said, and for this reason the higher type of maid refuses to take it. The hours of the bathmaids are, however, the best in the housekeeping department. This has led some chambermaids in spite of prejudice against the work to prefer bathmaids' jobs. In thirteen hotels in which work was obtained in the housekeeping department bathmaids worked a nine-hour day or less. The hours of work fell between 7.30 and 5 o'clock. In two hotels, they worked 8 1/2 -hour days, 7 hotels a 7 1/2 -hour day, in 3 hotels a 7-hour day and in one hotel a 6 1/2 -hour day. Lunch periods were unstandardized, as most of the bathmaids ate in the hotels.

Footnote 4:

The hours given are exclusive of the lunch period. One-half hour has been deducted in computing the daily hour schedules.

The special cleaners worked the same daily hours as bathmaids. In some hotels there was a squad of night cleaners also who worked from 6 P.M. to 12 midnight, and in the largest hotels there was another shift working from 12 midnight until 7 A.M. No information could be secured concerning these night shifts.

The weekly hours for bathmaids in the hotels varied from 45 to 54 hours. In five of the nine hotels for which weekly hours were obtained bathmaids were required to work from 45 to 50 hours a week and in four hotels from 50 to 54 hours a week. The weekly hours for bathmaids are long in spite of a fairly short working day because they work a seven-day week. The Sunday hours are shorter than hours for week days, varying from 5 1/2 to 7 hours. Sunday work for bathmaids seems unnecessary. The guests stay in their rooms late Sunday morning and do not wish to be disturbed by cleaning. Bathmaids are used to clean outmaids' closets and corridors and to take the places of the chambermaids who have failed to report for Sunday work. Because they have no regular work to do on Sunday, bathmaids highly resent the imposition of Sunday work. As their work is of an especially fatiguing nature they believe they are entitled to one day of rest. "It's mean to call you in on Sunday and keep you sitting around when you might be home resting or off having a good time," they would say. In three of the hotels bathmaids were given two days off a month or every other Sunday.

The large majority of workers in the housekeeping department are chambermaids. The hours of work for chambermaids are the most unstandardized of those of any occupation in the hotel. They vary greatly from establishment to establishment. Different maids in the same hotel work different hours, and hours differ for each maid on successive days of the week. This has made it difficult to give a general statement of the working hours of chambermaids.

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