Behind Closed, Sequentially Numbered Doors

By JACOB TOMSKY
NYT

DEPENDING on traffic, it’s usually no more than a one-hour car ride from the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown Manhattan to Rikers Island, each of which Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former chief of the International Monetary Fund, checked into for a time last week. But the accommodations provided are worlds apart.

I’ve worked in the luxury hospitality business (from New Orleans to New York, from valet parking to front desk to housekeeping management) for 10 years, and I know that the country’s 250,000 housekeepers are in a difficult position. They’re often alone on a floor, cleaning a vacant room, back to the door, the vacuum’s drone silencing all sound. A perfect setup for a horror movie.

Beyond their physical safety and the possibility of nude Frenchmen unexpectedly popping out of bathrooms, the time they spend in those rooms inevitably leads to problems. Housekeepers are routinely accused by guests of stealing money from nightstands, making international calls from the room phones, rifling through luggage and pocketing jewelry. I’ve heard every one of these charges leveled at colleagues. Rarely, I’ve found, do they turn out to be true.

Housekeepers perform the most physically demanding work necessary to operate a luxury hotel. Assigned 10 to 14 rooms a day on average, they strip beds, dump sheets down laundry chutes, remake beds, scrub bathroom floors, clean tubs and toilets, empty trash, polish mirrors, clean glasses, vacuum carpets — and the work does not end there.

(More here.)