Part 10

Most of the hotel workers prefer to live out. “You like a room by yourself which you know is clean. These hotel rooms have so many girls in them, and they’re all kinds.” But those who do live out experience the difficulty of paying rent out of their small wage. One girl, who worked in a New York hotel for $35 a month and meals, had to pay $25 a month for her room. “Of course,” she said, “I can’t live on that.”

A worker in a Rochester hotel, a widow with three children all living at home, earned $10.50 a week with no board or lodging. She said her eldest son was a printer who was out on strike. “He gets $19 a week strike pay,” she said, “while I get $10.50 a week for working 7 days. Of course my pay doesn’t make me independent. It just helps along. It doesn’t go far when you have to buy your own shoes and shoes for a 12-year-old boy.” One woman, who received $50 a month and lived out, worked all day in the hotel and then packed candy every evening from 6 to 10 o’clock to make enough money to live on. She had a family to support. Another intelligent American woman, earning $10 a week, was keeping her sick husband in one room for which she paid $8 a month. She had one bed and a table. The rest of the furniture was packing boxes. She had to prepare all the meals in her spare time.

Aside from food and rent, clothing is the largest item in the hotel workers’ budget. Both a uniform for work and street clothes are needed. The uniform was furnished by the hotel in only the largest New York City hotels. When charged to the worker it cost about $4.00. She must also furnish, if a chambermaid or waitress, a black waist and skirt for night work. This waist usually costs from $2.00 to $2.50 and the skirt at least $5.00. The waitress needs a number of clean white shirtwaists. Shoes are an important item to both chambermaids and waitresses who are on their feet all their working hours and must be neatly and comfortably shod. Workers complained that they need shoes every three months and that they cost at least $6 a pair.

After the necessary uniforms and a meagre supply of street clothing are paid for, there is little left from the wage for incidentals and to meet emergencies. Doctors and dentists are rarely consulted except in several large hotels where doctors and dentists are employed by the hotel and where workers can have attention at reduced rates. Women workers neglected their teeth through poverty and ignorance. The older bathmaids and maids frequently had only a few snags left. An oculist was an unheard-of expense. Few of the older workers wore glasses even when they had the greatest difficulty in seeing. Some used magnifying glasses to read the newspapers, and others could not read print at all because of the condition of their eyes. Magazines and newspapers were a luxury. Workers never bought them and read only what was given them by guests. Books were never seen. The workers seemed to have neither the energy nor the money for any kind of self-improvement. The younger girls could frequently find someone to take them out for amusement, but for the older workers there was no recreation at all. They complained that they could save nothing for their old age.

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How many guests, who pay from $4.50 to $9 a day for their rooms, know that less than 6¢ of this goes in cash to the chambermaid for her services? In one hotel where these rates are paid, chambermaids receive $300 a year or, allowing for two days off per month and a week’s vacation, a little less than 90¢ for a working day. This is for cleaning fifteen rooms. And yet we are told it is for service that we pay so dearly in hotels!

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LIVING-IN CONDITIONS

The living-in conditions described in this report are the conditions found by the workers who made the investigation. They lived in ten hotels. These included some of the largest hotels in New York City where a proportion of the women workers always live in.

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The food for maids and other women workers is served in “Helps’ Hall.” When the worker offers to take the new maid “down” to lunch she means it literally. Usually it is in the second basement underground. Through labyrinths, ill-lighted and heated, sometimes dripping from pipes overhead, she finally arrives at “Helps’ Hall.” Sometimes she finds it next to a basement laundry which is always steaming hot. As the worker enters, she faces a long row of steam tables. She has her meal ticket punched, grabs a tray, and gets in line. There is no choice of food. Her tray is filled with soup, meat, potatoes and pudding and she deposits it on one of the deal tables in the room and seats herself with the rest on a bench without a back. If she comes late, there is often a litter of spilled food and dirty dishes on the table which take away her appetite. There is a rattle of tin knives and forks. Usually only maids and other women workers are eating in the dining hall, although in small hotels men and women eat at different tables in the same room.

In the hotels in which the workers lived in, they found the dining-room service always hurried. Soup was usually spilled and too much sugar put in the coffee. In one smaller hotel in New York City where men and women ate together workers waited on themselves. All cut their bread from the same loaf, dished out meat at the steam tables, often with the help of their fingers, and poured their own milk. A late worker coming to lunch found messed-over remains of food which had been fingered by many unwashed hands of porters, laundrymen, maids and cleaners.

The quantity of food served was sufficient. Plates were well filled, second helpings were often allowed, tea, coffee, milk, bread and butter were always plentiful. Desserts usually “ran out,” but desserts were considered a luxury anyway. The quality of food was inferior. Poor cuts of meat and leftovers in the form of stew and hash with cold bologna for supper was the usual meat diet. Tinned vegetables, carrots, beans and macaroni without cheese were customary. Boiled potatoes were the mainstay. Rice, in different forms, was always served. Rice and bread puddings were the favorite desserts. Butter was often oleomargarine and milk was thin and blue. Fresh vegetables, fresh salads and fruit never appeared even in midsummer. It is true salads and melons were sometimes served, but they were wilted, and workers would not touch them. Ice cream, a very skimmed-milk ice cream, was served once a week on Sundays. Stale French pastries and sour chocolate eclairs sometimes appeared.

The following menus for “Helps’ Hall” in a New York hotel illustrate the unvaried, unappetizing and unhealthful food offered. The meals were served on the hottest days of the month of August. Breakfast: Oatmeal, unsalted and with lumps in it, sugar, tea and milk. Lunch: Macaroni without cheese flavored with meat grease, boiled potatoes, bread and corn bread, butter, coffee or tea and unflavored rice pudding. Supper: Fish (which was very strong and unedible), boiled potatoes, bread, butter and tea. Following this supper for lunch the next day there was rice cooked in meat grease with boiled potatoes and stew added. For supper there was stew again, corn bread, coffee, tea and bread pudding flavored with cinnamon.

And so on, every day appeared stew and boiled potatoes during a week of work in this hotel. The workers all complained of the food as not fit to eat. They said, “They don’t care what they give you in a hotel. Don’t eat most of it, it will kill you. They feed you like dogs here.” Many workers did not come to lunch at all. They made a little tea and a sandwich in their rooms. Many others on hot days, after eating such meals, had indigestion and were forced to leave their work. They went out for meals as often as they could, especially for supper. One girl said, “I am so sick of potatoes. I do want some fresh vegetables and a salad. Of course you can get a real meal sometimes outside, but, Holy God, on our wages!” Another worker was overheard giving advice to a girl who was leaving, “Well, kid, I tell you, it’s God’s truth this ain’t no place for a young American girl like you. When you’re young, you can get out. You get into a club, kid, where you get the same grub they eat theirselves. Here, the grub will make you old before your time. Look at me, I’m just thirty and I look fifty. If you stay here, you just get used to the food and everything. You see, they’re all old ones here. You get out. Now I just eat a little toast and tea some days. What else do they give you? Potatoes! I tell you to get out, though I hate like hell to see you go.”

The food served to pantry workers was much better and they could eat salads and fruit if they cared to. They ate on the job, however, and often had no time to eat their lunches. Waitresses in some hotels ate the same grade of food as maids and kitchen help, but they “picked up” extra food on the side.

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The lodging furnished women in large hotels was confined to bed space in a dormitory except in a few instances. The bedrooms varied in size, but were everywhere overcrowded. There were from two to ten girls in a room in most hotels. Cots were placed side by side and the only ventilation came from windows at the far end of the room. The rooms were often overheated and ill-ventilated. Several rooms opened on air shafts. In one hotel there were three occupants in a room with one window opening on a narrow airshaft. The air was “vicious” and it was so dark that an electric light was needed to see at noon.

In one hotel a worker, when shown to her room, was told, “This is an awful nice room, not many people in it.” It was a room 10 × 20 feet, with six beds, two dressers, no chairs and a row of lockers. There were two small windows at one end of the room. “There are twice as many girls in the room next door,” said the guide. A room in a large metropolitan hotel, 18 feet long, 15 feet wide and 10 feet high, housed eight girls. They slept in double-decker beds. There were two large windows and when the weather was hot enough so everyone was willing to have the windows open, the air was reasonably good. But when it was cold and some one of the eight girls wanted the windows closed, the air in the morning was frightful. Three dressers stood in a curtained space on one side of the room under which the clothes of the eight girls hung together. There was one straight chair apiece. The room was steam-heated, with an electric light hanging from the ceiling. When the girls who slept in the lower berths wanted to read they had to stick their heads out, as the upper berths took away the light. As the girls living in the room worked different shifts, there was always some one asleep, which meant that the rest must keep quiet. A girl coming in at midnight after a night watch had to undress in the dark. One of the maids said, “This room is one of the pleasantest in the house.”

In the smaller hotels dormitory rooms were less frequent. In one hotel two girls slept in double decker beds in an 8 × 10 room. In one hotel only were single rooms found, but this hotel had just begun to room its maids and had not yet filled the rooms with two beds apiece.

Beds had adequate linen which was usually clean, though often ragged. Towels and soap were furnished by the hotel in every case. In the larger hotels a maid cared for the rooms and made the beds. In the smaller hotels this was done by the workers, and bedrooms were very carelessly kept. There was an adequate number of baths and toilets in the largest, modern hotels of New York City, although they were often ill-kept and dirty. In the small hotels in New York City and in the hotels of the other cities of the State an inadequate number of baths and toilets were found and the plumbing was poor. Baths were ill-kept and often the hot and cold water faucets were out of order. In some hotels maids were expected to use guests’ toilets and showers at odd hours.

Laundry facilities were inadequate except in the largest New York hotels. Maids washed their clothes at night and hung them in their rooms to dry. The damp and unhealthful atmosphere in a bedroom in which wet clothes are hanging can be imagined. In some cases an iron could be secured from the linen room. In others, maids bought their own irons which they attached to electric lights in their rooms. In several hotels maids were required to wash their own uniforms under these conditions and often they washed clothes for the guests.

In no hotel in which the investigators worked was there a room in which women workers could receive guests. For social life they were forced outside the hotel to the streets. In only one hotel was there a telephone in the employees’ quarters. Three hotels had rest rooms for women workers with comfortable chairs and tables. Two had victrolas and one had a piano in its rest room. No books or magazines were ever found. In the majority of hotels there was not a comfortable chair which women workers living-in could use while off duty. They spent their recreation hours talking on trunks in the halls or lying on the beds in their rooms.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

On the basis of the facts set forth in this report, the Consumers’ League of New York believes that there is need for a special code for the hotel industry. The nature of the work in hotels is such that regulations regarding the length of hours and the distribution of hours in shifts cannot be made to apply to all occupations alike. Separate arrangements, therefore, must be made for chambermaids, pantry workers, waitresses, etc. The Consumers’ League recommends that a more intensive and extensive investigation be made by the State Industrial Commission to secure additional information necessary for drafting such a special code.

A Special Code for the Hotel Industry

The recommendations of the Consumers’ League as to points which should be considered in drafting a code for the hotel industry follow.