https://socialistaction.org/2019/08/15/shifting-the-balance-of-power-in-hotels/
Shifting the balance of power in hotels
/ 14 hours ago
July 2019 Hotel
Hotel workers picket in Stamford, Conn. (Photo courtesy Hospitality
Workers Local 2170
By ERNIE GOTTA and ERWIN FREED
??? STAMFORD, Conn. ??? Like any capitalist enterprise, hotel companies hate
losing profit margins to benefit the workers who make them rich.
Industry professionals debate about the type of model they need to make
the most profit. Currently, hotels in the Stamford area are running on
very lean models.
Sebastian Georgiana, a front desk agent at the newly unionized Sheraton
Stamford, said, ???For the most part our hotel is run with less and less
staff. Supervisors and managers often do our work to save the hotel
money. It???s one of the reasons we voted to join the hospitality workers
union Local 217. In the non-union hotels the situation is much worse.???
Hotel owners know that in the end there is a zero-sum trade-off between
their receiving the biggest pay-offs for their investments and workers???
taking home enough money to live. Even though the managers at every
opportunity promote the idea that the hotel is a ???family,??? they really
only care about their profits and do not blush about slashing hours to
the bare minimum.
Company strategies
Obscuring the definitions of job classifications is one way that
employers squeeze profits out of hotel workers. Lupita Agrado, a 20-year
banquet server and union steward at the Hilton Hotel in Stamford, said,
???Before we formed the union the kitchen managers pushed cook???s work onto
banquet servers, giving fewer hours to cooks and more work for servers.
Cooks are paid more hourly than servers, so it benefits the company to
schedule fewer cooks and pass that work on to me and my coworkers. Now,
as shop stewards, we are working hard to enforce our first contract, but
it???s not easy.???
At the Sheraton, workers are now fighting for their first contract, but
before voting to join Local 217 workers were often made to staff
positions other than their own, regularly taking on two or more
different jobs in the same shift. This allowed the bosses to hire fewer
people and cut hours for positions like the caf??. By keeping a skeleton
staff that is worked to the bone, they save a lot of money on labor
costs, but at the same time the hotel cannot maintain a high level of
customer service. Management proves again and again that they prioritize
profits over guest satisfaction.
Another strategy to save costs is ???flexible scheduling.??? At non-union
hotels this can take on many different forms including cancelling shifts
with little to no notice, cutting the length of shifts, and giving
inconsistent and/or irregular hours. All of these methods are helped
along by having salaried managers do work that would be in the
bargaining unit if the hotel were union.
Speed-ups, ???smart staffing,??? and Marxism
Capitalists, both individually and as a class, make their profits from
the amount of revenue they take in that is greater than what they pay to
workers??? wages and benefits. These profits are used to pay debts and
interests to stockholders, rents, and, crucially, expand production. The
fact that profits are generated by unpaid labor of workers is at the
core of Marx???s theory of capitalist exploitation, also known as the
labor theory of value.
There is a common confusion about the Marxist theory of capitalist
production, which is that surplus value is only generated by creating
material items as commodities. Under this view, service work is not
???productive??? in the Marxist sense because it does not necessarily create
a single item, like a coat or a shoe.
However, Karl Marx was very clear that this is not the case, stating in
the first volume of ???Capital,??? ???An actor, for example, or even a clown,
according to this definition, is a productive laborer if he works in the
service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labor
than he receives from him in the form of wages ?????? In hotels, the
commodity provided is a room cleaned and functioning to certain industry
standards, sometimes with amenities like room service, which can be
accessed via exchange of money for a room key.
In general, the capitalists??? revenue is realized with a definite pace,
given a particular number of check-ins with more or less the same
check-out time. The rate of turnover is relatively constant. The price
of individual hotel rooms is decided by competition around a common
market-level over the medium term.
Hence there is a more-or-less understood amount of money that falls into
the hands of the hotel???s owners over a period of time. This money needs
to be divided into various categories, the most important for us being
that of the wage rate. While capitalists may choose to neglect
maintenance of their means of production, for example, going past the
normal amount of time to renovate a property, the main avenue towards
???cost savings??? available to the bosses is squeezing every bit of labor
out of their existing workforce.
Marx pointed to two main ways that capitalists get more work from the
same amount of people. These are ???absolute??? and ???relative??? surplus value
extraction. Increasing absolute surplus value is accomplished by
extending the working day. This method will fall into play more often
when the hotel or department is understaffed. It is cheaper to pay
time-and-a-half for overtime than to pay two workers making the same
wage. Increasing relative surplus value is accomplished by giving a
worker more work within the same amount of time in a working day.
Tactics in this department include the aforementioned cross-training,
workplace discipline like banning cell phones on the job, and busy work.
Without its own organizations, labor is totally at the mercy of capital
in regards to how the working day is set-up. Due to competition between
capitalists and the relative similarity between fixed capital costs in a
given industry, the main mechanism that the individual capitalist has to
gain an advantage against its competitors is by increasing the rate of
exploitation through either absolute or relative surplus value extraction.
A constant fight
There are many more specific tactics the bosses use to extract from
their workers as much labor for as little cost as possible, but just
from the few outlined above we can already see why employers are
terrified of union victories. The whole logic of the profit-system
demands they always find new ways to increase their own profits at the
expense of working people. Simple and rational practices like enforcing
job designations, eliminating management from bargaining unit work, and
keeping to regular schedules all put dampers on the dream of being
industry leaders in profitability.
Companies still hold onto this dream even after union recognition, and
even when a collective bargaining agreement, is won. For this reason,
they try to hold off on implementing whatever gains they think they can
get away with. If left with only the contract, grievance procedures, and
their own ideas about how a hotel should be run, management, taking
orders from investors and corporate boards, tries to revert back to
non-union conditions. When they think they can get away with it,
management will try to use scheduling, seniority, and other means to
turn union members against each other.
While the grievance procedure is an important tactic, grieving takes
time, effort, and resources, all of which big companies have in greater
quantity than worker-funded organizations like trade unions. A worker???s
strength also does not exist in the formal relationship between the
union and the boss. Filing a grievance also put the ball in management???s
court because however strong a case the workers might have???short of
arbitration, another long and costly procedure???the decision is
ultimately made by the company.
Strength comes from shop floor militancy. What workers have on their
side is the ability to apply pressure on management through delegations,
workplace actions, shop-floor campaigns like button ups, or a strike.
The legal protections gained by simply winning union recognition are, of
course, incredibly important on their own, but legal protections do not
bring a good contracts, livable wages, and job security on their own.
They simply put the workers and the bosses on a more even level with
regards to their ???right??? to decide how business is conducted.
For workers to shift the balance of power on the shop floor, they have
to make the boss realize that it will be more costly if they don???t give
in to workers??? demands. Trade-union militants should keep in mind Marx???s
famous motto: ???Between equal rights, force decides.???
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August 15, 2019 in Connecticut, Labor.
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