The length and distribution of hours is so different for the different departments that it is necessary to discuss the housekeeping department and the kitchen, pantry and dining room departments separately.
Housekeeping Department
The function of the housekeeping department in a hotel is the housing of guests. It has sole charge of the bedroom floors. The function of the women workers in this department is to clean the bedrooms and corridors, to change the linen on the beds, to dust and sweep, supply fresh towels and soap and care for the baths, private and public. The bulk of this work falls in the daylight hours when guests have risen and gone about their business. In the large transient hotels, however, guests are coming into the hotel and leaving it until midnight. Part of the workers must, therefore, be on hand to attend to the incidental wants of the guests and make up new rooms at night.
The women employed in greatest numbers in the housekeeping department are the chambermaids, who clean rooms and make the beds, the bathmaids, who clean and scrub out the bathrooms and corridors and the special cleaners. Of these, the bathmaids’ and cleaners’ work falls in fairly regular shifts. Bathmaids work a day shift and cleaners, in the big hotels, work a day and a night shift. Chambermaids, on the other hand, have night work distributed among them according to the needs of the establishment.
Bathmaids’ and cleaners’ hours
The work of the bathmaids and the cleaners is, perhaps, the hardest women have to do in hotels. All day long they scrub out wash basins, tubs and toilets, polish brass, and mop up floors on their hands and knees. Their work is of fairly uniform intensity. It is “humiliating work,” as one bathmaid said, and for this reason the higher type of maid refuses to take it. The hours of the bathmaids are, however, the best in the housekeeping department. This has led some chambermaids in spite of prejudice against the work to prefer bathmaids’ jobs. In thirteen hotels in which work was obtained in the housekeeping department bathmaids worked a nine-hour day or less. The hours of work fell between 7.30 and 5 o’clock. In two hotels, they worked 8½-hour days, 7 hotels a 7½-hour day, in 3 hotels a 7-hour day and in one hotel a 6½-hour day.[[4]] Lunch periods were unstandardized, as most of the bathmaids ate in the hotels.
[4]. The hours given are exclusive of the lunch period. One-half hour has been deducted in computing the daily hour schedules.
The special cleaners worked the same daily hours as bathmaids. In some hotels there was a squad of night cleaners also who worked from 6 P.M. to 12 midnight, and in the largest hotels there was another shift working from 12 midnight until 7 A.M. No information could be secured concerning these night shifts.
The weekly hours for bathmaids in the hotels varied from 45 to 54 hours. In five of the nine hotels for which weekly hours were obtained bathmaids were required to work from 45 to 50 hours a week and in four hotels from 50 to 54 hours a week. The weekly hours for bathmaids are long in spite of a fairly short working day because they work a seven-day week. The Sunday hours are shorter than hours for week days, varying from 5½ to 7 hours. Sunday work for bathmaids seems unnecessary. The guests stay in their rooms late Sunday morning and do not wish to be disturbed by cleaning. Bathmaids are used to clean outmaids’ closets and corridors and to take the places of the chambermaids who have failed to report for Sunday work. Because they have no regular work to do on Sunday, bathmaids highly resent the imposition of Sunday work. As their work is of an especially fatiguing nature they believe they are entitled to one day of rest. “It’s mean to call you in on Sunday and keep you sitting around when you might be home resting or off having a good time,” they would say. In three of the hotels bathmaids were given two days off a month or every other Sunday.