“FEW PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT HOTEL HOUSEKEEPERS”, reflected Milan hotel organizer Massimo Frattini as he sat in his tiny Geneva office planning a global housekeepers’ week of action for “decent, safe jobs.” Frattini, who works for the IUF (a century-old international federation of food, farm, and hotel workers), has, since 2014, been the nerve center for worldwide low-wage workers’ protests. He reaches out to local affiliates of the IUF, which claims twelve million members in 120 countries. “It was easier than I ever imagined,” he says. “I was surprised. But the feeling was strong among our affiliates. They all wanted to do something big for worker power.”
For hotel housekeepers, the challenge has always been how to make the invisible visible. “When customers leave a hotel room,” Frattini quips, “many of them must think there is a fairy who comes and cleans. Or they do not think about it at all. In either case, they have no idea how punishing the work is, how hard it is on workers’ bodies. Making people see that it’s a human being who cleans your room—that is the first step to change.”1
The labor that service workers do is, by design, invisible. Domestic workers come and go. Often employers are out and, as if by magic, their houses become sparkling clean. Waitresses and waiters, bartenders and baggage handlers appear to customers as little more than outstretched arms and serving hands. “Back of the house” labor in hotels is even more hidden. That’s intentional. It shines the magic that hotels sell.
Behind the fantasy that hotel consumers buy are housekeepers: a mostly immigrant and almost exclusively female labor force. They strip and remake rumpled, sweaty beds, scrub dirty linens, food waste, cigarette ash, and unmentionable bodily fluids from ten to twenty-five rooms daily, making them appear fresh and new. It is brutal on their bodies. The International Labour Organization (ILO) says that ten rooms a day is the most anyone can clean safely. Still, some housekeepers must clean fifteen, twenty, even twenty-four rooms daily. And not just in Karachi but also in Providence, Reno, and Seattle.2
It used to be that way in Phnom Penh, says Chhim Sitthar, a slight, fierce twenty-seven-year-old who leads a union of more than three thousand workers at the glittering NagaWorld casino, which sits at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonlé Sap Rivers. “But we protested on International Women’s Day, and we joined the Global Week of Action for Housekeepers. Now sexual-harassment cases are down. The number of rooms we clean are down. We have three thousand members in our union. And women are the leaders. That’s unusual for Cambodia.”3
Until 2005, Diamond Island was home to fishing families. Some were bought out, others forcibly evicted. The island was a green oasis, says Vathanak Serry Sim, labor activist and child survivor of the 1970s Khmer Rouge death camps. “I used to come with my parents for picnics.”4
If the river island of Sim’s memories recalled the sleepy post-colonial feel of Phnom Penh before globalization, the metal and glass NagaWorld casino embodies the bustle of the new Cambodia. It brims with foreign capital, businesspeople, and NGO staff from the US, France, China, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, and South Korea. Outside, construction workers line up beams and girders for new hotels and condo towers. Young men who were farmers not so long ago now build glossy spaces where Phnom Penh’s multinational elite live and work.
It is a dangerous job, says Sok Kin, leader of Phnom Penh’s largest construction workers’ union. “Men sleep piled together in garages and inadequate shelters. Construction workers die every year in building collapses or bad falls.” Sok Kin’s union is one of the fastest growing in Cambodia, because construction is booming.5
The buildings on which they labor are sleek and modern, rapidly changing the face of a city once known for its mix of French colonial and Buddhist architecture. NagaWorld’s vast lobby, with crystal chandeliers and plaster reproductions of ancient Khmer statues rising over chiming slot machines, would fit well on the Las Vegas Strip. So would the hotel’s large and militant union.
Like Las Vegas workers, Chhim Sitthar and her comrades have had to fight some scary characters. Cambodia’s gambling industry is run by shady investors, international fugitives, and online gambling billionaires. And then there is the repressive Hun Sen regime, which will do pretty much anything to keep foreign capital flowing into Cambodia.
By 2013, says Chhim, NagaWorld housekeepers were tired of abusive managers, sexual harassment, and a monthly wage of $80, half of what they needed to live in the expensive capital. They sent a delegation to demand a raise. The company refused to negotiate. Chhim, and the older union men who had taught her to organize, persuaded 90 percent of the hotel’s staff to go on strike. “The company had no intention of seeking a solution,” Chhim recalls. The walkout changed that. Still, Chhim was worried. She feared the protests would cost her fellow workers their jobs. Unintimidated, they voted to strike anyway. “When I’m feeling disappointed I keep fighting,” she says. “The same is true for my members.”
Chhim and union vice president Pao Chhumony are proud that most members and leaders in their union are women. At their airy headquarters, a tight-knit group of women in their twenties plan intently for their next action. “These are the union counselors,” Chhim explains. “They talk directly to workers, help with their problems, speak to management for them.”
These slight young women have led tense strikes involving hundreds of workers. They’ve faced physical violence from police and company guards. And they have prevailed. When NagaWorld fired four hundred workers, Chhim negotiated hard and won them their jobs back. Journalists compared the women’s militancy to that of textile workers in the 1970s American South. “NagaWorld Staff Go Norma Rae,” one headline blared. Norma Rae was the fictional name given to North Carolina textile union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton, played by Sally Field in the 1979 Oscar-winning film.
In Cambodia, where two-thirds of workers are under thirty, Norma Rae and the J. P. Stevens textile strike immortalized in the film are relics of a distant time and place. Still, the young Cambodian rebel girls enjoyed the comparison. Like so many in this new global uprising, Chhim is serious about teaching her members labor history. Once compared to Norma Rae, she watched the film and learned the history. Now she wears the name proudly as she continues to fight for her members. They want maternity leave, higher pay, a reasonable workload, and an end to sexual harassment.6
With funding from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the IUF, Chhim and Pao travel to international meetings. They strategize with housekeepers from Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Together, they are developing labor standards across Asia, Chhim says. The slim, dark young woman hopes one day to become an attorney. Meanwhile, she says, she is working on “global actions and to have our friends in other countries help us.” Are you a twenty-first-century Norma Rae? I ask. She nods. “Maybe yes.”7
As the world sweltered through the summer of 2017, hotel workers were fighting hard to keep from sliding backward. In Manila, hotels that had once been union were turning thousands of full-time jobs into “temporary contracts.” Union activists were being fired en masse. The Philippine Labor Department ordered hotels to reinstate union workers. Some hotels outright refused, insisting that the workers were not covered by labor laws because they were not permanent. This is the new reality. In Spain, hotel chains outsourced 120,000 jobs to third-party labor suppliers after 2012, so they would not be covered by federal labor protections. Massimo Frattini says the IUF is learning to reckon with this new reality.8
Organizers for NUWHRAIN, the Philippine hotel workers’ union, wear a special T-shirt to reach workers. As international hotels are increasingly run by third-party management companies, surveillance has intensified. Organizers can’t easily approach even workers who have the legal right to join a union. Activists wear the shirts, says organizer Edwin Bustos, so workers will come to them. Dignified Housekeeper, the shirts say, in bold red on a black background. On the back are their demands. “Regular Employment, 8-Hour Workday, No Room Quota, Just Wages, Safe Workplace.”
When housekeepers talk of health and safety, Bustos says, they are focused on three problems. More than half, globally, are sexually harassed or assaulted. Housekeepers are fighting for hotels to adopt zero tolerance policies, to fire or arrest perpetrators. Toxic cleaning products destroy housekeepers’ health. They want the right to refuse to work with poisons. And housekeepers no longer accept managers’ insistence that they scrub bathrooms on their hands and knees. It is unnecessary. It’s degrading, and it hurts. Housekeepers suffer daily pain and long-term injury more frequently than any other profession.9
The other big issue is that hotels are constantly changing owners. They have become a hot investment for private equity firms who move their money in and out quickly. Investors have little to do with daily operations. Most large hotels are now run by professional managers who ramp up workloads, slash wages, and try to break unions. Brand names no longer mean much, says veteran hotel organizer Maria Elena Durazo: “One Hilton is not like the other.” International investors own a piece of a Starwood here, there a Marriott, in another city, a Hilton.
To organize, workers must first figure out who owns their hotel. That involves a fair amount of digging, and it can change in an instant. This is a common problem for twenty-first-century unions. Whether it’s garment factories or hotels, workers often don’t know who profits from their labor. Usually it’s not the same people who set their wages, but it is precisely these faceless investors whom workers must pressure if things are to improve.
Santa Brito learned this the hard way. When Brito first arrived in Providence from the Dominican Republic, she was hired in a nonunion housekeeping job at the Renaissance hotel. “The boss was decent. He was a human being and he treated us with care.” Then the hotel changed hands. The new owners brought in the Procaccianti Group to manage.
Procaccianti runs hotels for Marriott, Intercontinental, Wyndham, and other brands, providing “management through an owner’s lens.” What this means, says Brito, is that “they don’t think of us as human beings. All they want is to torture our bodies, to wring everything out of us, as if we are rags.” Brutal disregard, she says, drove her into the arms of UNITE HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers’ union.
“After the Procacciantis took over, they laid a lot of people off,” says Brito. “Then they cut wages for everyone else. The new supervisors were abusive. And they made us work so hard.” The threat of firing was unspoken but omnipresent. So even after her daily quota was upped to eighteen rooms, Brito didn’t complain. “They even stopped giving extra credit for checkouts, which take much longer than cleaning for guests who are staying.” Brito says she knew other Providence housekeepers had it worse. “In some hotels, housekeepers have to clean twenty-four rooms a day. You can’t work like that for long without getting hurt.”
When she became pregnant, Brito worried that the heavy workload might harm her baby or send her into labor early. Like most low-wage workers who do not belong to unions, Brito had no paid time off for illness or maternity leave. “I had to work. I needed to pay for my house and the baby.” She was afraid to ask even for unpaid time off. “I thought they’d fire me.”
Brito was changing bed linens when her contractions began. She asked to leave. Her shift supervisor said, “No.” Her water broke and Brito decided, “I don’t care.” And she left. “I went to the hospital to have my baby still wearing my uniform.” She says she barely had time to wash the cleaning solvents from her hands. Two weeks later, she was fired. As she hung up the phone, she realized that if she didn’t want to feel helpless, the only answer was to organize. Since that time, she has not stopped.10
Maria Elena Durazo says that a reasonable workload tops the list of demands for hotel housekeepers “because their bodies hurt like hell.” Hotel housekeepers have the highest rates of pain and permanent musculoskeletal injury of any labor sector. And Latinas have the highest injury rates of all housekeepers. In Las Vegas, one study found that 66 percent of hotel housekeepers had experienced pain in the past month, 75 percent in the previous year. These injuries were avoidable, say activists. Of the five-largest hotel management companies, three had injury rates that were twice those of the other two. This was something that unions could organize around.11
Durazo remembers being at a meeting in Los Angeles in 2011 at which a group of housekeepers were asked to mark an X on a diagram of the human body to show where they hurt. “These were housekeepers from different hotels. They didn’t know each other. But when they sat down we all saw they had marked the same places. They all hurt in exactly the same places.”
The veteran organizer pauses as she tells this story. Traffic noises echo in a loud Los Angeles café. “There was almost no dry eye in the room. We were crying. They were crying.” Durazo thought she knew what the women were thinking: “‘I was always told it’s me. It’s my fault that I get hurt.’ It was an amazing moment for them to realize that they were being told lies by management. The next step was, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”12
What they did was organize globally. In 2009, Hyatt hotels laid off one hundred housekeepers in Boston and replaced them with new immigrants earning half their salary. Though they were not union members, the laid-off workers appealed to UNITE HERE. The union’s decision to support them marked an important change in labor-organizing strategy. Facing the extinction of the American labor movement, a new generation of union leaders had decided to devote organizers, resources, and political capital to help low-wage workers who were not, and might never become, union members.
Laphonza Butler, just thirty-five when she became president of the California United Long Term Care Workers Union, the largest union local in the country, believes that strategy is working. She explains: “At a time when public opinion of unions was at an all-time low in the US, we had to make people understand that unions were there to defend all workers, not just their own.”
Rusty Hicks, the young head of the Los Angeles Federation of Labor, believes that unions must prioritize “raising the wages and the working conditions of all workers, whether they are in unions or not.” It is the job of unions “to ensure that all workers are empowered, that they come together and that their voices will be heard.”13
Hotel housekeepers helped to drive that strategy. In a 2006 campaign called “Profits, Pain, and Pillows,” UNITE HERE activists fought to establish national hotel wage and safety standards. There were protests and civil disobedience, lobbying and economic suasion. Hotel workers marched, picketed, and went on hunger strikes across the US. Hundreds were arrested.14
Three years after the Boston layoffs, UNITE HERE, the IUF, and affiliates in other countries launched a global “Hyatt Hurts” boycott. It worked, says Massimo Frattini. “A group of little housekeeping ladies” from the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa brought mighty Hyatt to the bargaining table. They were helped when President Barack Obama nominated Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker to be secretary of commerce in 2013. Worried about union protests at her confirmation hearings, the Pritzkers granted raises and union recognition to workers in all hotels still owned by the family. (It didn’t improve things for workers at franchised Hyatts, but it was still a huge victory.)15
That same year, a local hotel battle in San Diego raised another big issue—the way the hotel industry exploits undocumented immigrants. When a San Diego Hilton changed hands and workers complained about layoffs, heavier workloads, and reduced wages, they were fired. And information on the undocumented among them was sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The workers faced arrest and deportation. Nine fired workers went on hunger strike, fasting in a tent in front of the hotel. The mayor and state legislators visited. United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta fasted with them, drawing attention to the deep ties between the UFW and UNITE HERE.
Maria Elena Durazo, child of farmworkers turned UNITE HERE organizer, was trained as an organizer by the UFW. Both unions understand that there can be no labor justice without a path to citizenship for all workers, she says. And that will only come when unions register members to vote and fight for immigration reform. “That was true in the early twentieth century,” Durazo says, “and it’s just as true now.”16
Massimo Frattini believes that workers’ transnational networking is equally important in a global economy. He has organized worldwide weeks of action by hotel housekeepers each year since 2014. Workers from Massachusetts to California, from Manila to Buenos Aires, in the Maldives, Addis Ababa, Reykjavík, Oslo, and hundreds of other locales have participated. Some hotels have retaliated, firing workers. But the attention generated by global campaigns and boycott threats has given them power to fight back—which, says Chhim Sitthar, gives “meaning and excitement” to lives too often consumed by backbreaking drudgery.
“International attention provides a bit of clout for the most marginal workers in the world,” says Frattini. Ultimately, he hopes the housekeepers’ movement will be able to establish global hotel labor standards. Meanwhile, small victories can make the difference between a living wage and poverty, between feeling safe on the job and working in fear, between good health and a body racked with pain.
As for Frattini, who once hauled bags in a Milan hotel, he loves being the nexus for global labor actions. He works phones and computers like a dervish and travels incessantly, not only coordinating global actions by hotel workers but also by retail, farm, and fast-food workers. Strong coffee is essential, he says with a laugh. “This is just the beginning.”17