Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

As a silly example, imagine if all hotels started paying $200 an hour to their cleaning staff. I think we can probably all agree that they would be flooded with workers and have no shortage at all.

Given that there is a shortage now, we can infer that there's a pay point between the current prevailing wages and $200/hr that would cause enough people to want to work in hotels to solve the staffing issues regardless of people's preferences.

How many customers of the hospitality industry prioritize either cleaning staff pay, or how perfectly the room was cleaned, when they are looking at their options for a hotel and deciding who'll get their money?

Reasonable Assumption: Hotel management knows the answer, and makes their decisions accordingly.

She had a kid way too early with the wrong guy. She never had much of an education.

Her main job has been working at hotels as a cleaner, and makes something like $8 / hour.

The work was "on demand" -- the hotels wouldn't even give her regular hours. If they didn't have people staying, they wouldn't call her to show up. But, for $8 / hour, they expected her to be on-call -- even though she only got paid if they called.

It was just so cringe-worthy hearing her talk about what was expected of her to make $8 / hour.

She was only allowed like 15 minutes per room. She was never to talk to guests in the halls, unless they spoke to her first. She was told, "Never make eye contact with guests." One supervisor told her, "Better to just shrug and pretend like you don't speak English if a guest talks to you." My cousin has blonde hair and blue eyes.

The cleaners all got cut loose the moment the pandemic hit. No severance pay or Covid bonuses -- pissed me off knowing these companies were claiming pandemic hardships, and getting bailed out, but not passing assistance on to the employees most in need.

My family had to come together to help my cousin during that time -- and that's what family is for, but her employer sure wasn't there for her the way my employer was there for me.

She's never one to complain, or ask for help, but I know from how excited she got when I gave her a handful of $5-50 gift cards that she's never gotten more than $20 as a Christmas bonus.

The highlight of the job for her was when someone would leave a tip, forget something trivial in the room (a phone charging cable or something they wouldn't call lost and found over), or throw something out and she'd get to keep something she found in the trash. But she said they weren't allowed to keep anything from the rooms any more, even if it had been put in the trash. And they were supposed to report if someone left cash in the room, even if it was clearly a $5 tip. Pretty shitty.

Oh, and the kicker... she worked a lot, she was always on call for a few of the different hotels in her area. But if she made "too much" money she would lose her food stamps. There was an "un-sweet" spot, where if she worked too much it would cost her.

Anyway, I don't know what the moral of the story was. It all seemed shitty. Probably best to have robots do more of it.

I spent 7 years in my 20s and early 30s basically living in hotels for work. I have a "lifetime" status with one prominent chain.

I didn't put a lot of thought into the lives of the people who worked these jobs back then. But I probably should have. Anything that seems to good to be true, probably is. Pretty much any time someone walks away feeling, "What good service!" I'm sure there's an army of people being exploited.

I’d still expect them to get back to a stable job after their kid grow, but as it was a year or two ago, they just weren’t pulling their weight in the balance.

> ~$2000 a month to live at an absolute minimum. No luxury, no gadgets, just getting by.

Assuming 2000 is what you need as a standard working person, you need less than that in average when you’re in a couple, and the calculus is yet different with kids. When one of the adults stops working, a lot costs shift and it balances out. Gov aids, taxes and other benefits also change depending on your situation.