Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz is a bit disgusted with three Hyatt hotels in the Boston area. As she wrote in her column in Sunday’s The Plain Dealer, the management of these hotels recently had longtime housekeepers train a fresh crop of housekeepers who had been imported from Georgia.
The longtime housekeepers, one who had been with the company for 22 years, thought they were training staff to fill in for vacation leave hours. They thought this because that’s what management told them.
Boy, were those housekeepers duped. They were let go as soon as the new employees were trained. In all, 100 workers were given the heave ho. Those who were brought up from Georgia are cleaning rooms for almost half the salary of the longtime employees, plus they don’t receive benefits. The longtime housekeepers did.
Schultz isn’t the only one who is disgruntled with the management who has tossed out loyalty in the name of the bottom dollar. The mayor of Boston is calling the move “crude business” and hundreds turned out to protest outside the Hyatt Regency Boston last Thursday. This Boston Globe article that outlines the controversy also states that there is talk that people should boycott the Hyatt hotels that practice such dirty business.
Along with not knowing much about fair play, it seems that the management of those Hyatt hotels should consider this: If part of what one pays for at a higher end hotel is great service, cutting corners on salaries of those people who clean drinking glasses and the toilets may not be the best plan. Remember those hotel drinking glass horror stories that came out two years ago?