5 ms·

I've started to dislike this perspective, because it feels like an "if the only tool you have is a hammer..." kind of explanation. It's a valid perspective, but

I've started to dislike this perspective, because it feels like an "if the only tool you have is a hammer..." kind of explanation. It's a valid perspective, but it's not the only one, and other perspectives are often more useful. Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough. Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't. Or maybe hotels have to rethink their business models. It's an inevitable consequence of real wage growth that labor becomes more expensive relative to goods and services. At some point, the old ways are no longer viable. Hotels can't hire as many housekeepers as before, because people are not willing to pay enough for hotel rooms. Hotels must then find ways to provide housekeeping more efficiently with less labor.

wikfwikf 4y ago
What real wage growth?
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Wage growth vs inflation. If your wage goes up 10% but inflation is 11%, you actually have a real wage decrease. Generally speaking anyway.
hinata08 4y ago
Yes ! As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers. I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs ! I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ? When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled. They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything. That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs. If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value. (Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)
- cjrp 4y ago
  > When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Funnily enough I had the same thought when I arrived at JFK; compared to EU airports there seemed to be so many people just pointing you in a direction or yelling at you to get in a queue. It struck me that better UX and signage would make those people redundant (literally)
  - weberer 4y ago
    Maybe you landed during a slow time of day, but JFK is usually packed and those people are definitely needed to help new arrivals navigate customs.
    - cjrp 4y ago
      I've arrived at other airports at busy times (e.g. the return to Heathrow) and it's not comparable. Perhaps there are more non-English speakers arriving at JFK?
      - weberer 4y ago
        It's possible. It's the airport with the most international arrivals in the USA.
  - rsj_hn 4y ago
    It's more complex, and I really wish people wouldn't try to look at this purely from an economic perspective. If you see excessive workers in any government run agency, whether it's Willie Brown appointing 100 "mayoral advisors" in San Francisco, or 30 people standing around pointing towards an exit sign at a train station, then you are watching patronage networks in action. It's not like the station can't afford signage, or that those running the station are too stupid to allocate labor efficiently. We should not look down on these countries and their capabilities, they are just stuck in a different equilibrium. Poor nations, if they could avoid it, would always choose to spend less money per government service delivered, as it would allow them to deliver more service. It's not true that labor is cheap in poor nations. It's cheap for a rich nation, but not for the poor nation. But they are often governed in such a way that in order to obtain and keep power, you have adopt a clientist governance model, which is so common throughout the world, and this is a big reason why the nation in question is poor in the first place. Then you can ask "Why are nations governed on clientist principles?" And the answer is often related to the nation not having any other "glue" holding people together or incentivizing them to respect rule of law. To support a leader, they want some money in their pocket given to them by that leader. If he says no, another leader will arise that will offer to put that money in your pocket, and then that will be the one you support. The easiest way to give someone money is to give them a job where they get paid for doing very little. This continues in the private sector -- you are opening a tourist hotel and need good relations with a local notable. Well, he will expect that you hire many of his relatives or supporters. Then those supporters have a reason to support that leader -- because again he puts money in their pocket. The result is a different view of labor -- where jobs are given to people based on who they know and which patron is looking out for them. Such a system provides great stability -- Rome was built on these types of patronage networks. They may even be the oldest form of labor organization around -- the idea that random people should be hired based solely on whether they were needed or had qualifications -- that's a relative new, and in some sense dehumanizing way of looking at labor. In a clientist model, a jobs are assigned based on relationships. To counter this requires a strong cultural opposition to seeking this type of self-interest, and very few nations or regions have this. Even the U.S. was plagued by clientism after the large migration waves at the end of the 19th Century, as many cities became run by various machines that catered primarily to those ethnic groups that followed clientism in their native lands. It was what they expected from a leader in the old country, and so it was carried over here. Those old machines turned out to be incredibly hard to dismantle, requiring almost a century long struggle, and in many cities like San Francisco or Philadelphia, these machines are still in operation. So this is not at all related to the GDP, except for the fact that clientist nations tend to have lower GDP, on average, than the more rule of law nations.
michaelt 4y ago
> Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't. Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations. You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed? And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.
- ghaff 4y ago
  With hotels, worker shortages have probably exposed that many hotels were doing things like in person checkin and daily room cleanings that guests would often just as soon not pay for. At some hotels, cleanings were already optional in exchange for giving you some points (or even explicitly charged for). Hotels can certainly pay more. But automating or eliminating unvalued services makes sense too.
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Those people driving for those gig apps often value the flexibility of not having a set schedule. I don't think that style of work is very compatible with hotel housekeeping.
  - Zigurd 4y ago
    They also get paid reliably. Gig apps advertise for workers, in part, by touting their fast reliable payouts. Hotel cleaning is often contracted out to shady operators.
  - fishtoaster 4y ago
    Some do, some don't. On the margin, higher pay incentivizes people to compromise their preferences. 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.
phpisthebest 4y ago
>>Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough. Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations. My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  No, the issue is quite clear here, hotels dont want to pay a living wage for labor. How much clearer can it be?
  - andrewla 4y ago
    This is assuming that hotels are making enough money to be able to afford to pay more. If margins are thin, they have to increase prices or reduce expenditures in order to get more money. A hotel is not a license to print money; it has to come from somewhere. This can resolve itself in many ways. The classical outcome is that some hotels go out of business, and the supply of hotel rooms drops to the point where the demand means that a more realistic price level can be reached. The potentially better outcome is that smaller business that rely on non-wage workers (like family-run businesses) can effectively employ "workers" at a much lower rate in the hopes of outlasting the contraction of the hotel room market. The worse outcome is that big corporations can allow certain markets to lose money, because they are drawing sufficient income from other markets, and wait out the first culling, which will disproportionately affect local hotels that both rely on wage workers and do not have a capital backstop. Or, the market can just recover organically due to circumstances completely out of the hotel's control -- the local labor market could contract meaning that workers are willing to take a lower salary, or the tourist market could expand meaning they can book more rooms, or business expenditures for hotel rooms could increase faster than price levels overall.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      You also have the lever demonstrated in this article. You institute more automation, self-service, and cut back on services (like daily room cleanings) that a lot of customers don't really value.
wpietri 4y ago
I think this: > Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough. doesn't get at the point of this: >> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers. For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow! In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us. That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.

wikfwikf 4y ago

What real wage growth?

alistairSH 4y ago
Wage growth vs inflation. If your wage goes up 10% but inflation is 11%, you actually have a real wage decrease. Generally speaking anyway.

hinata08 4y ago

Yes ! As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers. I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs ! I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ? When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled. They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything. That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs. If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value. (Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)

cjrp 4y ago
> When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Funnily enough I had the same thought when I arrived at JFK; compared to EU airports there seemed to be so many people just pointing you in a direction or yelling at you to get in a queue. It struck me that better UX and signage would make those people redundant (literally)
- weberer 4y ago
  Maybe you landed during a slow time of day, but JFK is usually packed and those people are definitely needed to help new arrivals navigate customs.
  - cjrp 4y ago
    I've arrived at other airports at busy times (e.g. the return to Heathrow) and it's not comparable. Perhaps there are more non-English speakers arriving at JFK?
    - weberer 4y ago
      It's possible. It's the airport with the most international arrivals in the USA.
- rsj_hn 4y ago
  It's more complex, and I really wish people wouldn't try to look at this purely from an economic perspective. If you see excessive workers in any government run agency, whether it's Willie Brown appointing 100 "mayoral advisors" in San Francisco, or 30 people standing around pointing towards an exit sign at a train station, then you are watching patronage networks in action. It's not like the station can't afford signage, or that those running the station are too stupid to allocate labor efficiently. We should not look down on these countries and their capabilities, they are just stuck in a different equilibrium. Poor nations, if they could avoid it, would always choose to spend less money per government service delivered, as it would allow them to deliver more service. It's not true that labor is cheap in poor nations. It's cheap for a rich nation, but not for the poor nation. But they are often governed in such a way that in order to obtain and keep power, you have adopt a clientist governance model, which is so common throughout the world, and this is a big reason why the nation in question is poor in the first place. Then you can ask "Why are nations governed on clientist principles?" And the answer is often related to the nation not having any other "glue" holding people together or incentivizing them to respect rule of law. To support a leader, they want some money in their pocket given to them by that leader. If he says no, another leader will arise that will offer to put that money in your pocket, and then that will be the one you support. The easiest way to give someone money is to give them a job where they get paid for doing very little. This continues in the private sector -- you are opening a tourist hotel and need good relations with a local notable. Well, he will expect that you hire many of his relatives or supporters. Then those supporters have a reason to support that leader -- because again he puts money in their pocket. The result is a different view of labor -- where jobs are given to people based on who they know and which patron is looking out for them. Such a system provides great stability -- Rome was built on these types of patronage networks. They may even be the oldest form of labor organization around -- the idea that random people should be hired based solely on whether they were needed or had qualifications -- that's a relative new, and in some sense dehumanizing way of looking at labor. In a clientist model, a jobs are assigned based on relationships. To counter this requires a strong cultural opposition to seeking this type of self-interest, and very few nations or regions have this. Even the U.S. was plagued by clientism after the large migration waves at the end of the 19th Century, as many cities became run by various machines that catered primarily to those ethnic groups that followed clientism in their native lands. It was what they expected from a leader in the old country, and so it was carried over here. Those old machines turned out to be incredibly hard to dismantle, requiring almost a century long struggle, and in many cities like San Francisco or Philadelphia, these machines are still in operation. So this is not at all related to the GDP, except for the fact that clientist nations tend to have lower GDP, on average, than the more rule of law nations.

michaelt 4y ago

> Maybe there is an actual shortage. Then any single hotel can solve the shortage by paying more, but hotels in general can't. Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations. You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed? And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.

ghaff 4y ago
With hotels, worker shortages have probably exposed that many hotels were doing things like in person checkin and daily room cleanings that guests would often just as soon not pay for. At some hotels, cleanings were already optional in exchange for giving you some points (or even explicitly charged for). Hotels can certainly pay more. But automating or eliminating unvalued services makes sense too.
Karunamon 4y ago
Those people driving for those gig apps often value the flexibility of not having a set schedule. I don't think that style of work is very compatible with hotel housekeeping.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  They also get paid reliably. Gig apps advertise for workers, in part, by touting their fast reliable payouts. Hotel cleaning is often contracted out to shady operators.
- fishtoaster 4y ago
  Some do, some don't. On the margin, higher pay incentivizes people to compromise their preferences. 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.

phpisthebest 4y ago

>>Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough. Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations. My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.

dumpsterlid 4y ago
No, the issue is quite clear here, hotels dont want to pay a living wage for labor. How much clearer can it be?
- andrewla 4y ago
  This is assuming that hotels are making enough money to be able to afford to pay more. If margins are thin, they have to increase prices or reduce expenditures in order to get more money. A hotel is not a license to print money; it has to come from somewhere. This can resolve itself in many ways. The classical outcome is that some hotels go out of business, and the supply of hotel rooms drops to the point where the demand means that a more realistic price level can be reached. The potentially better outcome is that smaller business that rely on non-wage workers (like family-run businesses) can effectively employ "workers" at a much lower rate in the hopes of outlasting the contraction of the hotel room market. The worse outcome is that big corporations can allow certain markets to lose money, because they are drawing sufficient income from other markets, and wait out the first culling, which will disproportionately affect local hotels that both rely on wage workers and do not have a capital backstop. Or, the market can just recover organically due to circumstances completely out of the hotel's control -- the local labor market could contract meaning that workers are willing to take a lower salary, or the tourist market could expand meaning they can book more rooms, or business expenditures for hotel rooms could increase faster than price levels overall.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    You also have the lever demonstrated in this article. You institute more automation, self-service, and cut back on services (like daily room cleanings) that a lot of customers don't really value.

wpietri 4y ago

I think this: > Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough. doesn't get at the point of this: >> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers. For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow! In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us. That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.