Housekeeping by Design

Hotels and Labor

David Brody

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780226389127
  9780226389097
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226389264
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the great pleasures of staying in a hotel is spending time in a spotless, neat, and organized space that you don't have to clean. That doesn't, however, mean the work disappears—when we're not looking, someone else is doing it.

With Housekeeping by Design, David Brody introduces us to those people—the housekeepers whose labor keeps the rooms clean and the guests happy. Through unprecedented access to staff at several hotels, Brody shows us just how much work goes on behind the scenes—and how much management goes out of its way to make sure that labor stays hidden. We see the incredible amount of hard physical work that is involved in cleaning and preparing a room, how spaces, furniture, and other objects are designed to facilitate a smooth flow of hidden labor, and, crucially, how that design could be improved for workers and management alike if front-line staff were involved in the design process. After reading this fascinating exposé of the ways hotels work—or don't for housekeepers—one thing is certain: checking in will never be the same again.

1

Theoretically Checking In

Margie Garay, the director of housekeeping at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, becomes very excited while discussing turndown service. Turndown is the nightly ritual that occurs in luxury hotels throughout the world when guest room attendants transform the hotel room into a cocoon of comfort for the evening. Garay explains, “When you check into a hotel, it’s understood that you are going to get a clean room.” However, at the Four Seasons “everyone gets turndown and that’s the experience. That’s when 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” (fig. 1). She smiles and continues, “You walk in and you say, and no matter how hard your day was, you don’t say nothing other than home, ‘wow, home, I’m home.’ That’s the experience!”1

Figure 1 Turndown service at Four Seasons Hotel, New York. Permission by Four Seasons Hotel New York. Photo by author.

Garay’s notion of an “experience,” and how design plays an integral role in that experience, is what I explore in my investigation of the complicated relationship between design and labor. While Garay proudly describes the end result of the turndown process, the individual who worked to make that service occur in a seamless manner is absent from her description. Furthermore, note that the guest is not part of her narrative until she returns at the end of a long day. Suddenly, the guest enters into a magical space where the design of the room has been altered and her visual and aural senses are overwhelmed. The design of the larger system of housekeeping that makes this room presentable encapsulates a highly orchestrated, hidden process of management and labor, a scenario where work is invisible and surface appearances are paramount to the guest’s sense of domestic comfort and well-being.2

In what follows, I assess design and hotels by offering a theoretical perspective about the way in which workers create Garay’s notion of “the experience.” This chapter introduces several concerns that my book raises about the dialogue between labor and hotel design. I will define several of the theoretical parameters and conundrums that have surfaced in my study, and it is my hope that some of the ideas presented here will incite initial thoughts about design’s role in the guest’s experience, the hotel management’s decision making, and the amount of labor required to maintain these properties. Moreover, I hope to set the stage for my discussion about the need for hotel workers, and specifically housekeepers, to be included in the design process.

Unpacking

Hotels temporarily house guests who check in for either business or pleasure. The business guest wants convenience in terms of location, food, and an overall experience that does not hinder productivity. The vacationer also wants convenience, but in this instance the traveler focuses on spending time on activities outside work and engaging in tourism. Hotels, for both types of guests, promise an escape from the everyday, where daily stresses can be alleviated. As a putative escape, the design of hotels offers a liminal space where ideas about home become conflated with a space that clearly signifies that which is not home. The hotel can be homey, but contrary to Garay’s assessment above, it cannot be too domestic, since that would obscure the promise of diversion that the hotel industry is predicated upon. One does not have to do the everyday activities of home-related work in a hotel. Food is delivered, activities outside the hotel are reserved, beds are made (sometimes twice a day), and rooms are cleaned. By paying a fee, the hotel guest buys into the promise of being able to check everyday cares at the front desk and venture into a realm of coddling where labor seemingly vanishes.

Wayne Koestenbaum has theorized that when we check in and arrive at a hotel “existence uncannily suspends us above groundedness. To be in hotel is to float.” A hotel is a space that permits a “turn away from work as a means of ‘taking care.’ . . . To check into a hotel: this, too, may be a mode of taking care, of refusal.”3 Koestenbaum’s notion of floating above reality, based on his reading of Heidegger, is an ideal metaphor for thinking about what it means to envelop oneself within a hotel, where we are neither here nor there; we are neither home, nor away. For instance, part of what the guest embraces at a luxury hotel chain brand, such as the Four Seasons, is that whether she is in Hong Kong, New York, or Costa Rica, the marble bathroom, the oversized mirrors, and the enormous bathtub are guaranteed amenities that bring her back to an impermanent home at different properties throughout the world that signify familiarity, yet that offer just enough difference. Hence, much of a hotel stay is meant to emulate that which guests can, in a sentient way, latch on to as part of an experience that has become integral to globalization. The hotel brings us outside the banal and into the transcendent by creating a fantastical world that functions, through design, as a site that attempts to meet expectations that remind the guest that she is back “home,” safely ensconced by, in the case of the Four Seasons, a luxury brand that promises familiarity.

How does the work of hospitality get done in the liminal space of a hotel? The actual labor of moving items through hotels and getting guests what they want is not easy. Even more labor intensive is the less-talked-about concern of cleaning the hotel. The heavy lifting, which often occurs within what the hotel industry describes as the back of the house, becomes a performance that, when done well, is a seamless act involving, as one employee described to me, “smoke and mirrors.”4 In hotels, work takes on a peculiar duality where it is both seen and hidden. Things happen—again, food is delivered and beds are made—but the imagined lack of an agent in these passive acts of doing is exactly what many hotels want to highlight. Work should be noticed, but not overtly seen by the guest.5 This obfuscation of labor, which gets heightened by management’s consistent lack of interest in their workers’ ideas about design, creates an approach to commodities (things, places, experiences) that fetishize their value, distorting our sense of what something is worth.

Marx details how capitalist societies obscure the actualities of labor, relegating commodities to the class of things that we exchange without an understanding of the work that has transpired to make these goods. Because of this disconnect from labor, we transform the natural state of commodities into objects (and experiences) that take on special coded significance. Using the example of altering wood to form (or design) a table, Marx claims that the table is, in essence, a “common, every-day thing. . . . But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.”6 Here Marx defines a critical aspect of the design process. Design takes a natural or artificial resource and makes a product. For instance, the designer will use the possibilities of wood—its sturdiness, its pliability, its beauty—to create a table. Since the advent of industrialization, workers who follow the specifications devised by the designer manufacture the table. The finished table leaves the factory and then enters the marketplace. In this movement away from the actuality of work, the table becomes a commodity transmuted by consumers into something else, something outside the realm of work that enhances its meaning through the process of fetishization. No longer is the table merely a table, but now it has a “mystical character” devoid of the manpower that gave it life.7

This sense of mysticism that surrounds certain commodities becomes almost religious in nature. In its formulation of commodified desire that abstracts value and moves meaning away from the logistics of labor, the capitalist marketplace is, according to Marx, analogous to modern religion, where ideas about the divine and people’s place in a larger cosmological order become dependent on abstractions. In other words, we believe that which we do not see and, unlike other cultures that continue to worship the natural world that they can witness firsthand, capitalism rouses our faith in the intangible. This faith in the abstraction of meaning “is but the reflex of the real world,” where capitalism asks us to do in the marketplace what has been done in churches.8 We do not actually see the work, but we believe in value as if we had a type of blind faith in that which is being sold. For instance, Bulgari bath products appear on the marble counter in the bathrooms at many Four Seasons hotels, but the guest is left with this fetishized aftermath of labor; the actual work that went into creating the bathroom amenity and building the marble counter has been elided.9 Furthermore, the housekeeper who places the amenities and takes the products in and out of the room is often ignored. And what do we actually know about the labor that went into cleaning the bathroom and making the surfaces gleam so that the Bulgari product, with its radiant green glow, can appear especially alluring? And did the housekeeper have a say in the materials used to design that bathroom? And, if not, why has her voice not been heard?

In the world of hotels this elision becomes even more pronounced, since the ineffable nature of work usually functions as part of the back-of-the-house dance of service design, which is part of a complex system of exposing the end products of labor while concealing the difficult tasks that occur behind the veneer of what gets termed “good service.” In the luxury hotel, where service is, according to the Ritz Carlton’s website, about being “responsive to the expressed and unexpressed wishes and needs of . . . guests,” the imperative for work is abundant. Not only does that possible task need to be predicted, but also, of course, it should be executed in a manner that fosters “memorable and personal experiences.” Memories should appear without effort, and luxury simply happens with a smile and gesture that always embraces “anticipatory service.”10 This waiting in the wings to make things happen, to create the “wow,” gets accomplished through design, which mediates the encounter between the guest’s experience and the putatively invisible hotel employees.

Checking into a Four Seasons hotel during the day exemplifies this emphasis on how design helps to disguise the presence of housekeepers, as guests do not see what most other hotel patrons throughout the world observe as they walk from the elevator bank to their rooms. What is absent from the Four Seasons’ hallways is the housekeeping cart. The housekeepers use carts—in fact, Four Seasons properties often have two different types of carts, one for morning service and another for turndown—but the carts remain in a service room hidden on each floor. The carts are not in the hall; thus, housekeepers must go back and forth from the service room to the guest rooms while making certain that high levels of standards are met. This lack of a cart does, many would contend, make the guests’ stay more pleasurable. Navigating around cumbersome carts and seeing stacks of towels and linens put a dent in the pretense of service. However, what seems more important, rather than the overt aesthetic concerns, is the cart’s relationship to showcasing work. If guests must face the labor required to make their rooms the perfect cocoons that Margie Garay describes at the start of this chapter, their sense of pleasure, their delight in the physical appearance of the well-designed and well-maintained room, may fade.11

Marx and Marxist scholars, such as Harry Braverman, suggest a clear power dynamic where labor lacks a voice in capitalist societies, but scholarship on hotels has critiqued the limitations of this perspective, claiming that hotel workers have been able to negotiate authority within the hierarchical hospitality industry.12 Rachel Sherman claims that Marxist readings of labor tend to “focus on managerial dictates rather than on workplace relations.” She further notes that scholarship often looks at work “as a source of constraint on workers rather than as a source of enjoyment or alliance.”13 Additionally, Daniel Levinson Wilk urges us to assess hotels as places that encourage socioeconomic freedom, especially when we look at the service industry in relation to previous centuries’ commitments to slavery and inequitable work environments. Wilk argues, as I noted in my introduction, “that the modern service sector was not only better to its workers than its masters and mistresses were to servants, but that it played a significant role in the decline of servitude in the United States.”14 In my study of hotels I have found instances where a hierarchy defines worker relations within hotels, but I have also seen how workers have created powerful positions within the industry through unions and, as Sherman clarifies, through ordinary exchanges with guests and management.

Even with these instances of empowerment, guests and management often do what they can to silence workers, especially housekeepers. Thus, another way of thinking about the power relationship found in hotels is to consider line workers, or those who are not management, as what Erving Goffman deems “non-persons.”15 The non-person is neither the “audience” in a setting nor the central “performer.” He or she is metaphorically, and often literally, off to the side and not perceived as a viable entity during interactions. For instance, a training video the Four Seasons Corporation shows to select employees highlights exchanges between workers and guests. The dialogue on the video reveals ways to enact the standards of service that represent the Four Seasons brand. However, when it comes to representing standards through the example of housekeeping, the guest room attendant is silent. She cleans, she dusts, and she does her work with a slight smile, but she is Goffman’s exemplary non-person; she works in silence.16 Moreover, hotel guests admit that they often do not think about housekeeping. They take their room getting cleaned as a given, and when that service gets disrupted, they get upset at having to contend with that interruption. One guest I spoke with honestly noted, “I take housekeeping for granted.”17 While Marx and Braverman would most likely interpret the non-person worker as an obvious consequence of capitalism, something more complicated and nuanced is actually occurring. Again, and I want to stress the importance of this point, the negotiations that take place between unions and hotel management make it evident that the moniker of “non-person” is not quite accurate, as many workers do have agency in relation to the industry.18 Guests may not be privy to these negotiations, and many workers, of course, do not have union representation, but these conversations about workload, safety, and, as I explore throughout this book, design are integral to the daily operations of many hotels. There are several moments in what follows, especially in my chapters on the Hyatt Regency Chicago and Starwood in Hawaii, where I further explore these complicated and fluid power dynamics.

As Yvonne Guerrier and Amel Adib have posited, race, class, and gender define work roles and hierarchies within the labor organization found at hotels.19 Historically in the United States—and this trend is still very much a part of the industry—white staff tends to the front-of-the-house operations (front desk and concierge workers) whereas individuals of color often run the back of the house (guest room attendants, kitchen staff, etc.). This delineation can also be found outside the United States, where those from the country where the hotel is located are up front and on view for hotel guests, whereas those behind the scenes usually come from nations geographically distant from the hotel. These racial distinctions manifest themselves in power dynamics that enable guests, management, and line workers to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Vignette One  Booking a Room
• CHAPTER ONE  Theoretically Checking In
• Vignette Two  Plaza Memories
• CHAPTER TWO  Design and the Chambermaid: Mary Bresnan’s The Practical Hotel Housekeeper and E. M. Statler’s Service Code
• Vignette Three  “For Your Safety”
• CHAPTER THREE  A Textbook Case: Pedagogy and Housekeeping
• Vignette Four  The Hotel as Mise-en-Scène
• CHAPTER FOUR  Laboriously Unreal: Design and Hotel Impossible
• Vignette Five  You’re Doing Research Where?
• CHAPTER FIVE  Go Green: Design, Hotels, and the Sustainability Paradox
• Vignette Six  Chicago and Thick Description
• CHAPTER SIX  “We Truly Listened to Our Guests”: Rethinking the Redesign of the Hyatt Regency Chicago
• Conclusion: A Cinderella Story
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index