Spring Break’s Cleanup Crew
It’s the worst time to be a hotel housekeeper in Miami. The rest of the year’s pretty bad, too.
At the four-star Fontainebleau Miami Beach, the iconic, ocean-facing hotel immortalized in movies such as Goldfinger and Scarface, the service can feel as opulent as the vintage decor. While guests shop or lounge poolside, a small army of housekeepers works its way up and down the angular white and turquoise towers, cleaning about a dozen rooms each over the course of a day.
Among them is Adelle Sile, a Haitian-born housekeeper with cherry-hued corkscrew curls, a compact frame, and deep-set eyes. Around this time of year, thanks to the influx of spring break and Easter break vacationers, the time she has to clean each room during her eight-hour shift gets squeezed as guests stretch their mornings to the final minutes before checkout. When she does finally get in, she sometimes opens the door to find vomit, empty bottles, crack pipes, marijuana buds, and makeshift mattresses of cushions and blankets strewn about—the season’s bacchanalian detritus.
“My back [is] hurting me. Picking up trash, picking up trash, trash everywhere, like this, like this,” Sile said recently, demonstrating the scene in her modest, pleather-upholstered living room in her working-class immigrant neighborhood in North Miami. By the end of the day, she said in a Creole-inflected drawl, “My body dead.” (The Fontainebleau declined to comment for this article.)
~~~~~~~~~~
“Spring break is all about partying, getting drunk, acting wild. … And the housekeepers, they’re the ones that have to do the cleaning up after,” said Kandiz Lamb, an organizer with the hospitality workers union Unite Here, which represents workers at a handful of area hotels and casinos. “It’s all kind of stuff that happens. People getting so drunk [they’re] like almost drowning in pools, falling asleep in hallways, aggressive, getting into fights in the hallways.”
~~~~~~~~~~
And the mess rains down when spring break season hits. “People have shit themselves, they’ve bled a lot. We’ve had to throw away everything from an entire room—pillows, everything—because they’ve shit everywhere,” R. said in a recent interview after work.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_grind/2016/03/spring_break_in_miami_is_the_worst_time_to_be_a_hotel_maid.html?sid=554654ea10defb39638b510d&wpsrc=newsletter_tis
No comments:
Post a Comment