Every morning shortly after 6 a.m., Althea Porter leaves her Mississauga home for a trek into the core of Toronto, where she works at a large Holiday Inn whose shape begs comparison to a wedding cake.
She makes up 16 rooms each day, and is joined, on busy days, by some two dozen other room attendants. If everything's going smoothly, it should take a veteran attendant like Porter about 30 minutes to get a room ready for the next guest. That means stripping the sheets, replacing the bedding, cleaning the coffee pot and glasses, swabbing the bathroom, collecting the garbage, replenishing the soap, towels and stationery, and generally straightening up the place.
If everything isn't going smoothly - if there's a foyer full of conventioneers waiting for rooms or if Porter has to scour the hotel looking for supplies the day becomes a race against time. She routinely skips breaks and wolfs down her lunch. "Sometimes," Porter says, "people don't even take lunch."
Business people, says Filomena Canedo, an attendant who works on the other side of downtown at the Royal Meridien King Edward Hotel, tend not to make a big mess: "They just check in for one night." And long-term guests are the ones who are most likely to leave a note of thanks. But with tourists, kids' hockey teams or revellers in town for New Year's or a festival like Caribana, it's another story. "When you have families in the summer, then you have rooms that are really trashed," says Porter. "Those are the worst times for room attendants."
And over all, their jobs have gotten a lot tougher in the past year or two. Responding to competitive pressure, many hotel chains have laid on splendid queen- or even king-sized mattresses, plush duvets, extra pillows and other goodies for guests. "They call it 'signature service,' where everything is well done," says Canedo. "You put out the amenities so that when the guest enters the room, it's a heavenly place to stay, a second home. We do that every day."
Problem is, the attendants are still only getting 30 minutes per room. And when the mattress is large and heavy, upwards of 50 kilograms, it's awkward to change the sheets. Because of that extra weight and the bulky new duvets, attendants are suffering back and shoulder injuries. "I don't mind serving the guests, but not when it affects my health," says Porter, who earns $14.68 per hour after 13 years in the industry.
Workers like Porter have become more outspoken about the workload: This year, with no fewer than 400 hotel contracts up for renegotiation across North America, their union, UNITE HERE, has launched a hard-nosed bargaining campaign. The union, a 450,000-member giant created in 2004 with the merger of needle trades and hotel unions, aims to persuade the industry to provide its employees not with just higher wages but also with improved working conditions. Specifically, the union is looking for a reduction in the number of rooms an attendant must make up per shift and a guarantee that everyone gets breaks, to stop the practice of "working off the clock."
Paul Clifford, president of the UNITE local in Toronto, points to other "quality-of-life" issues, such as stiff-by-design mattresses. For guests, that's about getting a good night's sleep. But the room attendants have to lift the whole mattress when they change the sheets another factor that helps explain their injury rate, now higher than that of construction workers, according to union officials. The customer doesn't always come first, says Clifford. "Health and safety should trump everything."
Clifford points out that, during UNITE's talks with the Fairmont chain, the union negotiated a "reasonable workload" provision in its contract, unprecedented language, he adds. The three-year deal, covering 850 employees, also included wage increases of between 9.3% and 10.5%, and subsidized public-transit passes.
