What a housekeeper at Harvard’s hotel tells us about inequality

[mahatmakanejeeves]

What a housekeeper at Harvard’s hotel tells us about inequality

The Way We Work
By Lydia DePillis December 1 at 2:56 PM @lydiadepillis

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A couple of miles from the campuses of Harvard and MIT, in a curl of parkways and railroads, the 308-room DoubleTree hotel towers over the Charles River. The lobby inside is gleaming and vaguely academic, with vintage books artfully placed on wall shelves and abstract sculpture hanging from the ceiling. ... Upstairs, starting at 3 in the afternoon and continuing late into the night, Delmy Lemus races to clean 14 large suites. Making two beds each, plus sometimes a roll-away and a sofa bed that take all her strength to pull out, she barely has enough time to finish.
....

“I have a friend, they told me it’s a big difference working with a union and without a union,” Lemus said. “And they say ‘don’t stop, keep fighting, because it’s your benefits, your rights to have a better place to work.’”

Life is also a little easier for employees even within the entity that owns the building where Lemus works — Harvard University, which bought the DoubleTree in 2005 and now uses it to host conferences and give alumni discounts.

People who work in food service at Harvard, both employees of a contractor called Restaurant Associates and those employed directly by the school itself, are members of UNITE-HERE Local 26. After two years, the union said, they earn $21.73 per hour on average, while for many years the DoubleTree housekeepers earned only about $15 an hour. Last year, housekeepers at the hotel mounted a push to join Local 26 as well. Hilton, which owns DoubleTree, bumped salaries to $18 an hour — but has so far managed to avoid a unionized workforce.