Margie Garay, a former director of housekeeping at New York City’s Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street, extolls the virtues of turndown service, the nightly ritual of a second visit from housekeeping that’s only an amenity at the most luxurious of properties. At the Four Seasons, Garay told me for a book I was researching, “You come in after dinner, after the show, after the meeting, and your room light is dimmed, your drapes are drawn closed, your music is on classical, your turndown mat is on the floor, your slippers are placed. That’s an experience.” As Garay appreciates, guests at high-end hotels luxuriate in the seamless, sanitary, and agreeable experience that the hospitality industry provides.
To guests, it all appears effortless. Most seldom consider the ceaseless work it takes to maintain such opulent spaces, and this is by design. As Rachel Sherman, a sociologist at the New School, notes in her 2007 book Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, “Turndown service is an especially striking display of labor. Literally folding the corner of the bedding down, of course, serves no useful purpose; the gesture indicates, rather, that an invisible hand has been at work.”
Orchestrating this fiction of magical maintenance, though, can sometimes place a worrisome burden on hotel housekeepers. Designing luxury spaces without regard to maintenance can lead to high levels of physical injury among hotel housekeepers. One study of more than 900 Las Vegas housekeepers found that the “prevalence of severe bodily pain was 47 percent in general, 43 percent for neck, 59 percent for upper back, and 63 percent for low back pain.” Design decisions related to decor and equipment are often the culprits behind such suffering. These Las Vegas guest-room attendants, as well as housekeepers I interviewed in Chicago and Hawaii, cited heavy carts and vacuum cleaners as common causes of injury. Moreover, the repeated stress of specific movements, such as lifting heavy mattresses over and over again to get a perfect bottom-sheet tuck, can be a problem. As Ann Small-Gonzales, a housekeeper in Chicago, told me, “The bed is so close to the wall, in order to get that tuck [of the lower sheet] is uncomfortable. I think that’s how a lot of people might be getting hurt.”
Making housekeepers’ work invisible has been an objective of the hotel industry since its beginnings in the 19th century. In 1900, Mary Bresnan, a housekeeping manager, published The Practical Hotel Housekeeper, a book of essays about how to manage what Bresnan refers to, in the parlance of the time, as “chambermaids.” Bresnan’s book contains essays that were previously published in Hotel Monthly, an important trade magazine from the period, and in The Practical Hotel Housekeeper she offers her opinion on everything from the proper way to inventory linens to the importance of policing religious and moral virtue in the workplace—even which ethnic backgrounds she deemed best suited to which positions. (Specifically, she warned of immigrants from Europe, where “the art
of fine washing and ironing is confined to a few women who have been
trained to do this work from girlhood.”) To Bresnan, guest satisfaction was paramount, and controlling how chambermaids behave with paying customers was a source of vexing concern.
Bresnan was of the firm belief that chambermaids should remain inconspicuous, and she was aware that striking a balance between serving guests and completing work in a timely fashion turns out to require some diplomacy. “When there are three or more ladies on one girl’s division and all want their rooms done at once,” Bresnan advises, “the maid has to use tact in order not to give offense to any one of them.” She then recommends that the chambermaid explain to one guest that another might be entertaining “visitors,” thus stressing the importance of cleaning the room before said visitors’ arrival. Elsewhere Bresnan notes that the guest who has a suite should certainly allow the guest who only has “one room” to have her space cleaned first, since any woman with propriety would not “compel any lady to sit in a [single] room with the work undone.” Following this guidance, the chambermaid could then presumably complete her work, make all the hotel guests happy, and mitigate intrusiveness.
Bresnan’s demands and watchful eye were the harbinger of a new breed of early-20th-century hotelier who codified the idea of attentive, inconspicuous service and elevated the art of managing hotel workers’ visibility through the regulation of emotions. E. M. Statler, with his eponymous hotels, changed the prevailing business model by creating some of the first hotel properties in the United States with more than 100 rooms, in such locales as Buffalo (1907), Cleveland (1912), and St. Louis (1917). Statler, who devised one of the earliest examples of a hotel chain, emphasized service, both in terms of his standardized guest rooms (which included private bathrooms—a first) and workers’ interactions with guests, which had to abide by the inviolable Statler Service Code. This compendium of internal rules focused on the idea that the guest is always right—a variation of “the customer is always right,” a mantra that many in the service industry began to do business by during the early 20th century. To make good on that assertion, the hotelier declared that it was the responsibility of his employees to manage guests with emotional savvy and a disposition that fostered empathy while maintaining distance.
Statler designed his rooms to facilitate his call to service while rendering employee labor invisible or even removing workers, when possible, from customers’ experiences. The Servidor, for instance, was a modified door in guest rooms that could be found in Statler’s 2,200-room Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, which opened to the public in 1919. The Servidor was a cabinet in the door’s central panel that allowed guests to place items inside a hidden cubby from within the room, and could be opened by hotel employees from the outside hallway without having to interfere with the guest’s stay. This ingenious design also enabled a new and growing revenue stream—now clothes could be pressed and shoes could be shined in-house with ease and for a fee. The device allowed the customer to still be “right” without having to navigate an exchange (or the awkward expectation of a tip) with an individual worker.
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, bigger and more modern hotel chains proceeded to enact their own versions of Statler’s Code, as the interest in regimenting labor and standardizing design intensified with the development of larger brands, such as Hilton, which purchased Statler Hotels in 1954. As Annabel Jane Wharton, a professor of art history at Duke University, detailed in her 2001 book Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, many mid-century hoteliers mandated fast room turnover and an atmosphere of calming grandeur, relying on low-skilled workers in order to keep costs down.
Starwood Hotels and Resorts, founded in 1969 and acquired in 2016 by Marriott International, epitomizes the industry’s continued commitment to hiding labor. An immense global entity that manages and owns such brands as Sheraton and St. Regis, and has over 175,000 employees, Starwood has become adept at meeting its customers’ tacit expectations, especially when it comes to managing the workforce. Today, one initiative found at many Starwood properties around the world that has an enormous impact on its workers (unbeknownst to most guests) is a program called Make a Green Choice. Starwood frames this as a “guest-facing sustainability program,” allowing customers to assuage anxieties about their carbon footprints by opting out of housekeeping for up to three nights in exchange for a limited number of Starpoints, which can be used for free hotel stays, or a $5 food voucher for each day that a guest waives housekeeping services.
In 2011, I spoke with numerous Starwood housekeepers in Hawaii, where the hotel workers’ union successfully bargained to end the Make a Green Choice program earlier that year. These conversations indicated that this ostensibly progressive initiative had placed an onerous burden on staff. Devising a work schedule that had employees cleaning contiguous rooms became impossible with so many guests selecting the “green” option. This meant that a housekeeper who used to push her cart (carts can weigh a few hundred pounds, with ones that are fully loaded sometimes exceeding 500 pounds) down a single hallway to clean 15 adjacent rooms now had to move the cumbersome apparatus from floor to floor—or even from building to building, in the case of one hotel on the island of Kauai—in order to meet her daily quota of rooms. Moreover, housekeepers now had to clean sometimes-filthy rooms that had not been maintained by housekeeping for several days. Most significantly, with fewer hours of work per week, they lost pay in the wake of so many guests electing to Make a Green Choice
