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Boston A mess: Hyatt's housekeeping scandal September 30, 2009
Over a thousand San Francisco hotel workers and their community supporters demonstrated in Union Square September 24, 2009. ©2009 David Bacon, dbacon@igc.org BOSTON (Fortune) -- What was Hyatt thinking? That no one would notice? That no one would care? Well, the privately held hotelier, which announced plans recently to go public, screwed up big-time; everybody knows that now. Even Hyatt knows, although something tells me it hasn't completely sunk in yet. "I think that we feel that there are certain aspects of the transition that we could have managed better," says Farley Kern, a Hyatt spokesperson, "and that we really do regret that." The transition? Here's what Hyatt did: At 3 o'clock on a Monday afternoon, Aug. 31, managers at two Hyatt-owned hotels in Boston and one Hyatt-managed hotel in Cambridge, in a coordinated effort, summoned their entire housekeeping staffs, fired everybody on the spot, and immediately outsourced the jobs to a staffing company based in Atlanta. Lucine Williams, a single mom from Barbados who worked at the Boston Hyatt Regency for nearly 22 years, remembers the moment. "I could not believe my ears," she says. "I was in shock. People start crying. I start crying. And after we start crying, they say you can go get your package." Williams's "package" was two weeks' pay plus one week for the first five years of service (never mind the other 17), for a grand total of $4,289.60. "I know you're upset," a supervisor said to her as she was leaving for the locker room to change out of her uniform, "but can I have your name tag?" Here's what we gradually learned, beginning several days later with a front-page story in the Boston Globe: That most of the 98 fired housekeepers were immigrant women; that some of them had been working for Hyatt for more than 20 years; that before they were fired, they were directed to train their replacements under the guise that the newcomers would be available to spell them during vacations; that whereas the job had once paid nearly $16 an hour, it now paid minimum wage in Massachusetts, $8 an hour; and that henceforth, housekeepers would be expected to clean up to twice as many rooms in a day to meet their quotas. Read the rest of the article.
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 “‘I don’t know how they can treat people like that’... Lucine Williams, who has worked at the Hyatt Regency Boston for nearly 22 years.” “‘Where am I going to look for a job?’... Drupattie Junga, a widow who had worked at the Cambridge Hyatt for more than 21 years.”
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