With up to 17 rooms to clean each shift, Fatima Amahmoud’s job at the Moxy hotel in downtown Boston sometimes feels impossible.

There was the time she found three days worth of blond dog fur clinging to the curtains, the bedspread and the carpet. She knew she wouldn’t finish in the 30 minutes she is supposed to spend on each room. The dog owner had declined daily room cleaning, an option that many hotels have encouraged as environmentally friendly but is a way for them to cut labor costs and cope with worker shortages since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unionized housekeepers, however, have waged a fierce fight to restore automatic daily room cleaning at major hotel chains, saying they have been saddled with unmanageable workloads, or in many cases, fewer hours and a decline in income.

The dispute has become emblematic of the frustration over working conditions among hotel workers, who were put out of their jobs for months during pandemic shutdowns and returned to an industry grappling with chronic staffing shortages and evolving travel trends.

  • StrandedInTimeFall
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    13 days ago

    Personally, no mandatory daily cleanings. But, just like if you smoke, if you basically trash the room, then you should be required to pay higher fees when it takes longer than the minimum to clean up a room. Lots of dog hair, human fluids everywhere, major spills, garbage everywhere, etc. That way you have to pay the overtime for all the time it takes to clean up a trashed room. Take a video of your room before you check out, and if they say it took longer, then dispute it with the video.