Exactly. What's disappointing is that they quote this hotel owner saying the old "nobody wants to work" trope when it's 100% false. They even bring up a conflicting quote a few paragraphs later, but I really doubt when she said that the person interviewing her said "no, you're wrong, and here's why." And it's not immediately and forcefully disproven in the article. It's not a difference of opinion, it's just wrong. It's disappointing it was even printed, honestly.

But this family will go on continuing to pay poverty-level wages for a brutal and thankless job convinced that other people are just lazy.

I'd be curious if the hospitality industry has the margins to pay them more or if this is just greed. If they don't have the margins and $20k-$30k is all that position can make them this is just a job being handed over to machines.

As the article pointed out, people are getting more educated and they're able to sniff out opportunity elsewhere. Jobs like housecleaning don't have a trajectory and possibly can't (though I'm open for refute).

Agreed! It’s not that people don’t want to work, they don’t want to work for $16 an hour, with no benefits, and get discarded on a whim to make the quarterlies look good. I don’t blame them.

> $16 an hour

I was in Vegas last month and they were advertising something like $12-13/hr for hotel cleaning jobs. In Vegas! Bonkers.

Why is that "bonkers"? What should these workers be paid in your opinion? Perhaps this is exactly the attitude that's causing this problem?

It’s not so much a problem as a correction - wages have mostly tracked inflation since the ‘70s (the $15/hr people get paid for menial jobs today sounds glamorous but is roughly the same as the $2/hr I was making at a menial job back then), plus now you have all the issues with the healthcare system being an unworkable mess - thank Richard Nixon for that.

Fleeing to where? Are other industries paying better? Except for niches like tech, wages are stagnant across the board.

Risk avoidance. Poor people can't economically handle "someone sneezed so you get no income for months". Plenty of low paying jobs never closed during covid and everyone's crowding into them to avoid possible economic disaster.

Normally you fix lack of employees with higher pay, but low pay is baked into the cake they can't pay more and stay in business (which is the step right before going out of business, BTW).

Housekeeping/cleaning is pretty low wage regardless, and the pandemic gave a lot of people an opportunity to get new skills. Not saying they went into tech but almost any industry pays better.

A lot probably also went into industry that pay comparatively the same but offer more flexibility in scheduling.

Amazon warehouses, mostly. It’s also a worker treatment shortage. They leave for somewhere with equally low wages but less nonsense to put up with.

Amazon warehouses are no picnic, and their attrition numbers show it. But compared to industries that exploit immigrants and where wage theft is common, a warehouse job is objectively better.

A lot of people don't understand how hard it is at the bottom of the labor force.

Gig work is a big one. Gig work is taking a huge bite out of the lower-income + more physical service jobs. You still have no benefits and your pay sucks, but you at least can usually control your hours and you don't need to worry about being penalized/fired for getting sick/needing a few days to care for kids/etc.

Catering, retail, call “center” (often remote positions).

Yep.

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.

Just a matter of time before the Hotwire and Priceline bookers get a lower level/standard of cleaning for their rooms.

(I don’t care for intermediate cleanings when I stay, just at the beginning personally).

That's still a staffing shortage... If people aren't willing to work at the wages hotels are looking to pay then their job will be replaced by robots.

So people have been saying for 70 years. If a robot exists today that can make a bed and dust every surface, it probably costs $1M.

Correct! Plus a housing crisis.