I was at a music event at a local park last night and ran into a friend that is a department manager at a local very fancy hotel.
He told my that if they didn’t have J1 employees (people that come from other countries to work) for housekeeping duties they would only be able to sell the hotel at 50-60% occupancy – which is what they had to do last year.
They are also short cooks. They’ve had one applicant in the last several months. Now mind you, this is a great starting point for a culinary career (it’s where I started mine) because the resort has so many different kitchens to learn in. Lots of people used to apply here to work just to have the hots name on the resume. The hotel staff actually even get great benefits even by large corporation standards.
There are no lunch options at this (internationally renowned) resort because there are no servers or cooks to make the food.
I want to break this down because lots of struggling Americans work in hotels, and learning how to apply the most pressure means knowing where their most important sources of revenue are and how to disrupt them.
Housekeeper Strike- this is probably the most important thing in a hotel. Get the housekeepers on the union train. If you remove the cooks, you can just close the restaurant and blame it on repairs. It’s that easy.
Housekeeping is necessary to sell tomorrows room, which is the only room the hotels care about. Hotels need to function at a certain occupancy percentage in order to cover their bills. Anything over that is what is delivered to the bottom line.
If a housekeeping department initiated a strike or a slowdown during peak season, the financial burden would be too great for the hotel owners to ignore. They absolutely rely on selling peak season rooms for the highest rate they can. That offsets the slow periods of their season.
Let’s say a room in peak season sells for $100/night for easy math. Firing slow season let’s say $75. If a housekeeping department can force an occupancy drop in the peak season it’ll take waaaaay more energy to make that up during slow season which means that for a lot of hotels right now is the time to act.
If I were to initiate a hotel strike (and I have a degree in hotel mgmt and lots of experience) here is how I’d do it.
1- court the housekeepers. They’re the dept that will have the biggest effect. They need to do a full on strike.
2- maintenance. If you can convince them to strike, the hotel will suffer because no one in mgmt knows how to fix shit.
3- kitchen staff. Here is where it gets fun. They can strike or they can do a work slowdown. If a customer comes in and has to wait for their room because housekeeping is on strike, then they have to wait an hour for their burger- mgmt will hear about it.
4- front desk. Be careful here because this dept works pretty close with mgmt. if the front desk walks, mgmt has to check guests in and hear the complaints. If the staff still wants to work, they can give discounts, comps or whatever drips cash from the account.
And here is the most important part. You don’t need a union to strike. This doesn’t have to wait until next year. If you and your coworkers have had enough bullshit, one of the busiest holidays of the year is coming up for a lot of hotels.
Give ‘em hell