Chambermaids’ Hours
The large majority of workers in the housekeeping department are chambermaids. The hours of work for chambermaids are the most unstandardized of those of any occupation in the hotel. They vary greatly from establishment to establishment. Different maids in the same hotel work different hours, and hours differ for each maid on successive days of the week. This has made it difficult to give a general statement of the working hours of chambermaids.
In transient hotels chambermaids work a daily shift in which they change the linen, dust, and sweep in an assigned number of rooms. This work falls within a fairly regular period. In addition they take turns at being on watch in the morning from 7 o’clock to 8, in the afternoon from 4 to 6 o’clock, and at night from 6 to 12 o’clock, or 6 to 10, according to the establishment. Maids have an irregular lunch period also, except a small minority in a few hotels who were found to take an hour and go home. The workers leave the floor in many hotels when they have finished their daily work often several hours earlier than the leaving time scheduled. On the other hand, they are often kept beyond the scheduled leaving hour because there is a shortage of linen and they must wait for it in order to make up their rooms.
Extra shifts or watches occur in frequencies of from one watch every twentieth night to one watch every morning, afternoon or evening. In two hotels no night watch for the regular chambermaids occurred. A relief watch of maids was added to the staff to work from 6 to 12 o’clock. In one of the hotels this was installed as an economy measure. In several other hotels night watches were made optional and extra pay was received by a maid for each watch taken. Under this system some maids, in order to increase their earnings, might overtax their strength. Night watch in the smaller cities lasted only until 10 o’clock and occurred at less frequent intervals.
When a girl complains of long hours, the housekeeper usually replies that there is a nice short day on Sunday. The maids do not take this as a great consolation, for they regard one full day’s rest in seven as their right. In all but two hotels in which jobs were held, a straight seven-day week was worked by all chambermaids. The Sunday hours were shorter, workers usually leaving at 2 P.M. instead of 4 P.M. In the other two hotels two days off each month were allowed. These days off were most irregularly given, however, at the discretion of the housekeeper. If there was a shortage of maids, there were no days off. One worker in one of these hotels said she had been there two months and had worked every day.
In 12 of the 14 hotels[[5]] in which jobs were obtained as chambermaids the regular daily shift varied from 6½ hours to 8½ hours, exclusive of the lunch period. The regular weekly shifts varied from 45½ to 59½ hours. But the extra shifts make the weekly hours worked by chambermaids excessively long. The average number of hours worked weekly in “extra watches” varied from none to 21.04 hours. The actual working hours for chambermaids, by which is meant the regular weekly hours plus the average number of extra hours each week, in the 12 hotels, are as follows:
49.38
50.16
50.75
50.94