US Hotels and Their Workers: Room for Improvement

Policy Recommendations

This report has highlighted both positive and negative features of hotel employment.  The hotel industry has relatively strong employment and wage growth, many entry-level jobs, opportunities to create career ladders, the relative absence of extremely long work hours, and relative stability of employment within the industry and its occupations (although not within individual hotels).  However, we have identified several features of hotel jobs that are in need of improvement: low wages and many poverty-wage jobs, wages that are insufficient to support a single parent and child in nearly all major hotel metropolitan areas, absence of career ladders for many low-wage workers (despite the opportunities that exist to create them), growing wage inequality, falling employee benefits, many part-time jobs and a relatively large amount of involuntary part-time work, high job turnover and high occupational injury rates. 

Solving these problems requires public policies that will support union and employer efforts to promote the high road and block the low road in the industry.  The following are some policies that could achieve these goals.

Provide Government and Foundation Funding to Multi-Employer Partnerships in the Industry

Individual hotel employers, acting alone, are often unable to raise productivity, improve working conditions, reduce turnover, or train workers in skills that are useful throughout the industry.  Their difficulties include lack of knowledge, the fear that other employers will hire away workers that they have trained, and widespread low-road competition from employers that compete on the basis of low wages and do not systematically try to raise productivity.  If employers in the industry work together, though, they can overcome these obstacles.  Because hotel workers have much of the knowledge that is needed to solve employers’ problems, multi-employer partnerships in the industry should include worker participation.

Three existing multi-employer hotel partnerships illustrate the some of the ways in which partnerships can improve hotel jobs.  In Atlantic City, casino hotels and Local 54 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) have worked together to create an apprenticeship program to train chefs.  In the San Francisco Hotels Partnership, downtown hotels at the high end of the industry work with HERE Local 2 to train line workers and managers in resolving labor-management conflicts, reducing the labor turnover that those conflicts often cause.  Las Vegas’ Culinary Training Academy, a non-profit organization formed by HERE Local 226 and major hotel casinos, trains hotel workers, helps place them in jobs, and through its training and placement efforts, helps workers advance within the industry.  The activities of all three partnerships both benefit workers directly and help raise hotel productivity.

Government funding could facilitate the formation of similar partnerships in other major hotel centers.  Funding from foundations, particularly those that are concerned about the well being of low-wage, minority, or immigrant workers, could do so as well.  These partnerships could help reduce the high rates of labor turnover that are unproductive and costly to both workers and employers.  In addition to providing labor-management dispute resolution training, some other ways that partnerships might help reduce turnover are to find ways to improve job safety, redesign jobs to make better use of worker skills and explore ways to reduce the number of part-time jobs.  At the same time, multi-employer partnerships are ideally situated to help workers make productive career moves from one hotel to another in cases where it is difficult or impossible for them to advance within a single hotel.  Partnerships could promote multi-employer careers by working to make job definitions and skill requirements more uniform among hotels in a local area, training workers in skills that are useful throughout the industry but not specific to a single employer (such as cooking), and establishing portable pensions, health insurance and other employee benefits.  The fact that hotel workers typically stay within the hotel industry even though they often change employers makes it desirable for partnerships to address these issues.

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