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Going "green" can be cutting jobs
A Make a Green Choice card hanging on a door at the Starwood Sheraton Centre Toronto. It restricts the hotel's housekeepers from cleaning the room, in an effort to save water and electricity.
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Kai Ryssdal: If you've stayed in a hotel room in the past, I don't know, 10 years, you've seen those little cards by the sink. 'Help us conserve water and energy,' they say, 'reuse your towels.' Something like that.
Starwood Hotels has taken that concept to the next level, to the dismay of the housekeeping staff.
Marketplace's Sean Cole explains.
Sean Cole: As I methodically walked the floors of Starwood's Sheraton Centre Toronto, I kept seeing these cards hanging from the doorknobs. I counted them quietly.
Cole: There's one "Make a Green Choice" card.
They're like Do Not Disturb cards. But they say in big letters: "Make a Green Choice."
Cole: Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. This is a hot floor.
The card means 'Don't clean my room.' Housekeepers can't go in. In exchange, the guest gets a $5 coupon toward food or beverages within the hotel, because less cleaning saves water and electricity. Fewer chemicals go down the drain.
Or that's the hotel's side. The room attendants have another name for the Make a Green Choice program. They call it the Fake Green Choice program.
Brigida Ruiz: Yeah it's fake.
Brigida Ruiz is a shop steward for a union called UNITE HERE! She's been a room attendant at the Sheraton Centre Toronto for 19 years. And she says when you hang that card on your door, you're not just cutting back on water and electricity.
Ruiz: You also cut the hours from the room attendant. If 200 guests hung that tonight, somebody count how many room attendants they have to cut.
Of course there were only 29 cards out of more than 1,300 rooms the night I went. The point is less cleaning means fewer cleaners. Ruiz says this is just a sneaky way of reducing payroll. Also, guests already had the option of reusing their sheets and towels. So the only difference Make a Green Choice makes, she says, is a messy one.
Ruiz: And they use it for three days to five days to seven days. And when they check out the room is very bad. It's really filthy, dirty, dusty.
And it takes her three times longer to clean it, she says, which requires even more water and cleaning fluid than usual. I called the general manager of the Sheraton, who referred me to parent company Starwood, who never provided someone to interview despite several requests. The company did email a statement saying Make a Green Choice has saved nearly 30 million gallons of water, about 129,000 kilowatts of electricity and 37,000 gallons of chemicals thus far. This is at more than 160 Sheraton and Westin hotels across North America.
UNITE HERE! is doubtful about those stats, and has made this a bargaining issue in ongoing contract negotiations. They want to kill the program, just like they were able to do at five hotels in Hawaii.
Eric Gill: On Kauai where they have most actively promoted the program, we've seen as much as a 25 percent loss of work hours in our housekeeping department.
Eric Gill is with UNITE HERE! Local Five in Honolulu. He says a partner company to Starwood wanted to convert a bunch of hotel rooms into private condos. Which, again, would mean fewer hotel rooms to clean. Negotiations began.
Gill: We absolutely needed hotel accommodations to drive our jobs. And so the discussion became how many of this and how many of that. And when we came down to the numbers, the number of hotel rooms they were offering would work if there's no green program.
So the company conceded. Room attendants in Toronto have no such leverage. But the thing I keep coming back to is this:
Gill: We believe that most people who assertively care about preserving the environment are the kind of people who would also care about the jobs and livelihoods of the workers in the rooms that they stay in.
Exactly. So the hotel says, 'Help us conserve!' and the union says, 'Help us keep our hours!' and... aauuugh! It's enough to drive socially conscious vacationers insane! All I can tell you what I'm gonna do next time I go to a Sheraton: not take the stairs.
Cole: I wonder how many floors this hotel has.
Forty-three. There are 43 floors.
In Toronto, I'm Sean Cole for Marketplace.
Are you kidding? Am I supposed to stop recycling when the sanitation engineers need to bargain or stop using my bicycle to ride to the store when the rig workers bargain. if they stop producing the "going green" cards then the card works will be put out of business. This story really failed to put the problem into perspective.
This piece is one-sided.
It doesn't ask the question of whether in a receding economy should a business be looking for ways to cut their operating costs, and maybe lower their prices so that cash-strapped customers can still afford their services.
Second, pick your battles: if the point is to be ecological, then do that. The goal isn't "be ecological while creating or preserving jobs".
There is no magic bullet to solve all of the world's problems at once, not even in the wildest Progressive fantasy.
One step at a time.
Lastly, didn't the President promise us millions of green jobs that his new vision for America would create? Let the chambermaids get jobs doing that: assembling solar panels, etc.
Didn't he in general promise us that Cap & Trade would spur business, not atrophy it?
Wait... are you telling me that he lied and being ecological kills jobs???
Say it ain't so... Jo... Kai.
If I pay for a hotel, it should be clean BEFORE my stay, DURING my stay, and after I leave. This is the cost of "hospitality", which, of course, is passed onto us, the consumer. It is none of our jobs, as consumers, to contribute to a service provider's environmental lip-service, in the name of catchy mantras, at our expense. When hotels monetarily credit us for returning unused linens, lower hvac use, using less water, and the like, that's when we should gladly do so.
I am personally nearly fed up with the decade-plus trend of cutting goods and services (and NOT prices, mind you) to exclusively serve the interests of these providers, only to have them cut personnel and the cost of service delivery, and then have the gall to claim they run a "green" shop.
I'll even go far out enough on a limb and say that it is not our duty to oblige service provider staff with gratuities as a matter of routine, only if their service was above and beyond. Tipping is another way that we're enabling providers to get away with lowering their costs by keeping wages low. If somebody's good at what they do, they should be paid a fair rate, not be contingent upon the consumer's generosity. That's how "good" hotels get repeat customers, and unclean hotels get labeled environment friendly name-brand flee-bags, by how well the provide "hospitality".
One of the first things my family and I do, after checking into a hotel, is cancel housekeeping services for the duration of our stay, usually for 2-3 days. Just because we're in a hotel room doesn't mean we should trash it, so rarely should it take housekeeping that much more time to clean up after we check out. We even try to reuse as many towels as we can (including all those pool towels). We want to have a planet around when our son is our age; right now, it's not looking good for him to go snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef (in part, thanks to climate change). At our Inn Serendipity B&B that we also operate, we line-dry linens and tidy up our guests' rooms, not turn over the whole room with new linens and towels. Our guests seem to respond favorably to our approach, and we're more viable as business as a result.
This may be enough to drive a "socially" *over*-conscious consumer insane. But any *truly* socially-conscious consumer would be *reasonable* and weigh the claims of both sides. And for that matter any truly socially-conscious consumer wouldn't describe herself as such.
Sorry- I really want to support chambermaids and hotel support staff- I DO tip- but when I did stay in a lot of hotels I always felt like the cleaning attention was too much. 1. I prefer having a choice 2. I don't see how cleaning a room once, no matter how many nights you stay in it REALLY contributes to more use of cleansers. I recently did a Triathlon in Wash. D.C. and the weather for the event was awful- rain/mud. I rinsed out my stuff in the bath tub and cleaned myself. Stayed another day an left. Think about it; was it any dirtier after 2 days than it was after 1? NO. I just used another set of towels.
I travel every week for business and stay at major chains (SPG, Hilton, Marriott). I always follow the hotel instructions for "making a green choice" (for example, hanging my towels so that I can reuse them). The process rarely works. 95% of the time I still end up with new towels each day. Clearly there's still a lot of work to be done to get this right.
But, Ky Ryssdal's report did get me excited about the future. "Going green" is good for business. Of course, less cleaning will mean less labor. Maybe the unions should work with companies to train employees for future needs rather than playing the guilt card with companies and their customers.
Keeping people employed for jobs that aren't needed anymore doesn't make sense. We've watched enough jobs disappear because unions have been unwilling to look forward.
