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.
Good luck to them. It’s a thankless job. We tip the front of house when all they do is hand you your take-out, but not the workers that clean the skid marks you left in the toilet, or the hair dye in the tub, or the beer someone spilled in the carpet. They’re the ones that should be getting tipped.
They’re understaffed for the same reasons as any in the service industry - shitty work and especially low pay.
You can and absolutely should leave a tip for the cleaners whenever it’s getting done. Just leave a note that says, “thank you, here’s a tip.” With the cash next to it.