Classy, Hyatt. Get them to train their own replacements by lying to them.

I guess at least now we all know yet another management ploy to be on the lookout for.

I live in Boston so I don't have to worry about staying at one of those hyatts, but I'd be slightly concerned about increased theft of property from guests staying at the hotel.

I travel at least one week a month for business and I just called Hyatt at (888) 591 1234 to let them know that I'll never book a Hyatt hotel again.

The outsourced cleaning service is probably using illegal aliens, which is why the pay is so low without benefits. They are probably not paying taxes either. These are the people liberals claims are "stealing jobs nobody else wants". Everybody wants to make a decent wage with health benefits, but when companies hire illegal aliens to cut costs and avoid paying taxes, that screws all Americans.

Report the cleaning company to the IRS and INS. That'll take care of the problem and put Hyatt under more unwanted scrutiny.

Can I ban Hyatt now based on principle instead of not being able to afford them?

Wow. What happened to the concept of SCABS?

How do the Hyatt Execs sleep at night?

I know- on the pillow-soft goodness of a Hyatt's bed! Made by scab labor.

So I guess it was cheaper to outsource their housekeeping to a different firm, rather than lower wages or cut 401k matching?

Okay, this might really be the case. But does it seem like to anyone else that Hyatt could feasibly do this so they can shuffle the blame onto another company if the workers happen to be illegal immigrants or get treated poorly?

They trained their own replacements without knowing. That's beyond low.

I stayed at the Hyatt in Wichita, KS once. My friend had got us the room there. I didn't understand what was so special about it. Sure, it had a fancy lobby, but the room was comparable to Motel 6. Shoot, at least Motel 6 had a mini fridge and free internet. Then in the bathroom there were two bottles of water with little sleeves that said "Refresh your body only $3.00"! Then they charged an arm and a leg for breakfast items... what ever happened to "free continental breakfast?" Its all okay though because we still had fun.

I'd choose motel 6 over a Hyatt any day.

I work in a hotel and I can pretty much promise this is going to be a disaster. Not only will the outside company not have the same standards as the brand but the employees won't know anything about the rest of the hotel so if a guest asks them where the gym is they will get zero customer service...I can't believe that Hyatt HQ would let these hotels operate within the brand after doing this. Housekeeping is HARD, HORRIBLE work. No way I'd do it for 8$ an hour. Even 15 is pushing it.

Nasty lie, unless the management considers the employee layoff a vacation or every day a holiday at their hotels.

I suspect that other Hyatts are going to have a rough time trying this approach.

The lack of benefits for the new workers is what really gets me. Make no mistake, the whole deal is shitty. But I don't see any reason not to give a full-time employee benefits like health insurance. Be a fuckin' human, as Stewart would say.

@pythonkid: I will not, ever, ever, ever stay at a Motel 6. I have higher standards, and a need to feel safe. I hate motels with a passion. There are different tiers of Hyatts, even though they're all simply named Hyatt. I've been in some really fantastic Hyatts. The one near Chinatown in DC comes to mind.

@SugarMag: Yes, yes you can.

Wow, that is so fucking low. I don't even have the words. I'm sure some of the housekeepers would have rather taken a paycut then loose their jobs entirely because of corporate greed.

Classic outsourcing BS..... save a buck off the backs of the minimal wage employees.

Next time outsource the hotel manager. I bet we can find somebody who will do the job for half the salary, which would save a lot more $ than reducing the salary of a few maids.

@NightSteel: Glad to know Hyatt likes to lie. Therefore, I won't bother going there knowing they'll lie to me when they tell me they have rooms for a certain price.

Hey, why don't you out source your management too? You could save millions!

@TCama: I know I am. Any company who treats employees like that doesn't get my business.

err... that's so sketchy. $15 / hour isn't exactly a living wage as it is in most large US cities.

And the captains of U.S. business and industry lament that worker loyalty is a thing of the past. When bean counters -- usually far removed from the workers affected -- declare that X dollars can be saved over the next quarter by firing Y workers today, why would anyone be loyal. Perhaps when there's no one left that can afford to stay at Hyatts (or buy houses, book plane fights, or purchase cars, computers, etc.) maybe someone will make the connection.

And what you want to bet that the HR department at this Hyatt -- while smiling, talking nicely, and pretending to a be friend of these workers -- actually engineered this whole thing. If there ever comes another revolution, there should be a place at the gallows for HR directors.

@SugarMag: yep

I think this calls for an EECB!

Can anyone get some email addresses?

Also not mentioned in the story is that $8/hour is the minimum wage in Massachusetts. So when the outsourced service company says they are paying a "competitive" wage they really mean that they are paying the absolute minimum that they can legally get away with.

Shameful all around. This is one case where I hope Hyatt gets buried under an avalanche of bad PR.

It's all about numbers! That's all the corporations see. They don't see people, they don't see livelihoods, all they see are numbers.

"We need to cut costs by $X...I know! Let's outsource our housekeepers, we can save $X plus more doing that and boost profits!"

@unit3: $15 an hour calculates to be about $31,00 a year, which may not be livable wage for a family. But for one very frugal individual, it's not terrible. There are certainly a lot of people making a lot less.

The problem is, a lot of the people who comprise the housekeeping industry's workers don't have the prospect of moving to a higher income bracket unless they become managers or get out of the housekeeping industry entirely. For a lot of people, $31,000 is the ceiling.

@JGKojak: on a pile of cold hard cash?

@pecan 3.14159265: i'm with you...i want my door facing an interior hallway, not an exterior parking lot. the only motels I've stayed at were an econolodge in syracuse, something on cape cod (where they then found a dead body shortly after our stay) and Pop Century @ Disney.

never stayed at the hyatt. i've stayed at various levels of the marriott, holiday inn, hiltons, the sheraton, and a country inn and suites.

I'm sorry; $15/hour is too much for a housekeeper, especially when that figure does not account for benefits. This is one of many drawbacks to union labor; the Hyatt was unable to justify paying their staff the union wage, but could not lower the wage due to union regulations. Ergo, layoff.

Perhaps negotiating with the union would have helped find an alternate solution to the situation, but the fact is that the union would have likely been intractable and inflexible to the point that Hyatt's hand would have been forced (see: auto industry).

@unit3: true, but at least with a 401K there might be some hope. plus housekeepers might make decent tips.

but however much a struggle 15/hour is....if the replacements are paid less without benefits, that's even harder.

First they came for our programmers, and I said nothing. Then they came for our auto workers, and I said nothing. But when they come for our housekeepers, damnit, I can't keep my mouth shut anymore.

@dragonfire81: Well actually, corporations are made up of people, and those people are the ones that made the decision to whack the housekeeping staff.

They know exactly what they're doing. I'm not sure why you wouldn't think otherwise.

We're having a wedding in the Boston area and we're planning on having out-of-towners stay in an airport hotel. Crossing the Hyatt off the possible hotel list.

@pecan 3.14159265: I'll vote in the middle. I've stayed at a few Motel 6s ranging from adequate (clean) to one that was really, really bad. Each time I went I checked in late at night and left early so it's not like I was planning to actually enjoy myself. Only stayed at Hyatt when the company I worked for paid. The stay was wonderful but I wouldn't have been willing to pay for it myself.

P.S. At one of the Motel 6's I actually did enjoy trying to figure out what the quarter slot next to the bed was for. After I gave up and put in a quarter I then got to consider why someone would want a bed to bounce (I was much younger and kind of...naive). Fortunately, the bouncing stopped after a few minutes. Not kidding.

@winstonthorne:

RTFA--the fired workers weren't ina union.

I realize that this is not Daily Kos, but this kind of story is really only tangentally consumer news.

Everything is getting outsourced so that no company continues to have to find themselves in the very UNcompetative situation of providing decent wages and benefits. And it's not just happening at the low end of the wage scale anymore. Ask an unemployed IT worker, or radiologist. Eventually, we WILL be competative again, but only because of the widespread squalor, most markedly among college-educated kinda-sorta professionals who have had their incomes and their personal worth redefined by globalism.

I'm sure that will do wonders for the US consumer economy.

@winstonthorne: Are you defending the treachery of Hyatt in this case, or merely taking advantage to yet again attack unions? I ask for informational purposes only.

@winstonthorne:

Have you ever taken a UV light into a hotel room?

$15 an hour isn't even close to being enough pay.

I'm no fan of unions, but thanks to them you get a 2 day weekend and overtime after 40 hours.

It sounds like you haven't worked for hourly wages lately.

What's worse is this week is National Housekeeping Week!

@winstonthorne: You are woefully - yet hilariously - ignorant.

@pecan 3.14159265:
One of the loopholes of Temp Agencies and Outsourcing- If your outsourcing hires illegals, then it's no longer your problem if your employees are illegals.

You can also Hire and Fire at will.

Temping and Outsourcing is the ultimate way to shit on employees.
why?
Becuase they're NOT REALLY YOURS.

@winstonthorne: If the Hyatt was unable to justify paying their staff the union wage, then why'd they agree to it in the first place? You can blame unions as much as you want, for the Hyatt situation, for the auto industry, but at every point management has made an agreement with the union. The union may not have known what the employer could afford (employers are often extremely secretive about this stuff at the negotiating table) and made their demands based on their own understanding of the situation (although you will never hear me disagree that unions can be stupid and reckless and politically motivated). Management can agree, or take a strike. It's a 50/50 split, blame-wise.

So, we assume the room rates were lowered as a result of this?

I thought so.

If anyone is suprised by these ploys, they have not been in the business world long enough. It sucks for the workers but that's how businesses are run.

@NightSteel: This does happen all the time in every industry.

That said, I am glad I am a Marriott man (parking rapes not withstanding).

@winstonthorne: It seems like you have a grudge against unions, which is your opinion. But the workers weren't in a union, so their wage was earned "honestly" without anyone to negotiate for them. Does this still make them overpaid? Think of it this way: A lot of these people are in their mid-30s and mid-40s, some of them even older. Most of them are poor immigrants. Most of them are women, and a good amount of them probably have families, possibly with young children.

When I got out of college, I made $17 an hour. My very first real job, and I made more than these people do, and more than many of these people will ever see in a year, and you think they're overpaid?

@tfarrenkopf: [www.hyattpressroom.com]

I wrote to the Director of Brand Public Relations.

I work in the staffing industry and have a little insight into the cost savings they are looking at here. For a company like to Hyatt to pay housekeepers $15 per hour plus benefits plus 401k match it probably costs between $19 - $23 per hour. Generally the bare minimum to employee someone is 18% of salary, for employees with benefits and 401k it is typically between 30% and 50%, sometimes as high as 60% to 80% of salary. The staffing company who got the contract probably is charging a basic markup over their costs (employee salary) typically between 28% - 50%. So Hyatt goes from paying $19 to $23 per hour to the employee with various long term commitments (401k, cobra, work comp, unemployment)to paying a staffing company $10.24 to $12 per hour with no long term obligations to the employee.

Sadly from a numbers perspective as long as the increased theft/lower quality work doesn't cost them more than $7 per hour per employee they come out ahead. Personally I think that with these pay rates they are going to be in for a rough time. They are going to get excessive amounts of theft and lower quality work and I think this will cost them more customers than its worth.

@Buckus: So you are saying that the cleaning will be done by folks in India, and the linens replaced in China?

MA has universal health care so at least they have that.