working as a hotel housekeeper

A little forewarning. I'm going to talk about excrement here a little more than you might be comfortable with. If you're made uncomfortable by that, but not by the acutely exploitative nature of our market economy, you have bigger issues than I can help you with.

You might recognise me, but chances are your eyes will just glaze over me. When I'm in navy, pushing a trolley of clean linen and a bin bag that contains quite a few dirty nappies, you don't see me. I knock on your door around 11am to freshen up your room, when I hear you inside but you don't come to the door I just move on. You poke your head out and look up and down the hall, calling to your partner inside 'no one out here, honey'. Well, I am out here, but I'm about as inanimate as the desk lamp or minibar to you.

When I'm on the street and we cross paths outside the hotel, me dressed like a human being and not in the drudgy oversized tshirt and leggings of my profession, you might step out of the way for me, flash me a smile, maybe ask me for directions somewhere. If I am my usual polite self when you ask where that museum is, I give you a good impression of the people that live in this city. If I give you the same helpful information while I have a sweaty forehead and am simultaneously carrying 4 towels, bed linen and a bin filled with toiletries, 2 pairs of slippers and a magazine, you will be visibly amazed at how well I speak English, give advice, am confident. You do not expect that of someone in my profession.

You don't expect a housekeeper to have a personality. You say 'good morning' back because you feel obliged to, a little awkward about it, maybe. You expect a classifiable individual, a member of some minority group, low education, low aspirations, happy to do backbreaking work for years on end, and nothing more. The truth is that the women I worked with came in all shapes and sizes, but were perpetually categorised as 'housekeeping girls', despite being 20, 30, 40, married, divorced, some speaking several languages, having children, a life, a home, an education, unique skills and abilities, a backstory, a narrative. None of it matters when you have 15 do-outs to clean before 3pm. As soon as you put on the name tag, everything that makes up the unique and wonderful person that you are is taken from you, put in a plastic bag with your name written on it and placed in the lost and found bin.

In my first week we were given some nondescript bleach with which to scrub the shower walls of the inevitable mold that appears in grouting after several years of constant use. A few hours later a supervisor rushed around to tell all the 'girls' to stop using the bleach right away; it was giving people headaches. I spoke to one colleague a week later. The woman had not just gotten a headache, but passed out in the shower, been taken in an ambulance, had her vitals and reproductive organs checked, told by the doctor that extended exposure to that chemical can do serious damage to your internal organs. There was no apology or explanation from management. The thing I found most unbelievable about this was how the woman just accepted it as an inevitability of the job.

There are things that I come to expect, and as someone who has spent years in customer service I will deal with a lot. But the long list of things you are expected to deal with as a housekeeper, sometimes it's too much. The 26 or 13 minutes given to clean a room (depending on 'do out' or 'stay over' status) is utterly unsatisfactory, and that is with every single second being accounted for. Being expected to set up and clean up your trolleys on your own time, that is unsatisfactory. The huge quantity of human excrement dealt with on a daily basis, anyone would find that exceedingly unpleasant.

 Every pile of sodden towels in the otherwise clean bath that now had to be washed, every awful mother who let her child do whatever the hell they wanted and leave that whatever-the-hell smeared on every visible surface, every puddle of piss on the floor beside the toilet, binbag full of dirty, stinking nappies, not entirely rolled up, furniture rearranged, papers ripped up and tossed beside, but never inside, the bin, wet bed sheets, bronzer-stained sinks, makeup stained mirrors and generally every single indicator that humans, when left to their own devices in a hotel room will turn into unsanitary, unapologetic, and ungracious foul entities, this is too much.

The woman who trained me in laughed at me (and not in a friendly way) when I said I was tired after working my 6th day in a row. She told me she had once worked 18 days straight, and that eventually everyone would do that. It was the sacrifice you made for the job. I'm sorry, what? It became increasingly apparent that the sacrifices were to be completely and utterly one-sided. The shit salary (in Denmark, 115kr/hour x 15 minus endless deductions is not enough to live on, as my empty bank account is testament to), high tax, part-time hours which spilled over into your free time as you were called every god damn day off at 7am asking if you could come in for 8.30, none of these things negatively impact upon management in the slightest. These are the kind of sacrifices utterly terrible people expect those they consider inferior to them to make, in an economic reality that dictates that the supply-side should always bear the burden with a gracious 'tak for i dag'. 

The worst thing about working as a hotel housekeeper in an exceedingly wealthy, overwhelmingly privileged place is not that the guests are the worst people on earth. No, the scariest, saddest, most regretful thing for me is the amount of people who think they have no choice but to do what they do. In the 4 years you've worked as a cleaner, you could have taken out a loan, taken a college course, gotten a decent job and be on your way to paying back said loan, in line for a better future for yourself. Or if you wanted to stay a housekeeper, demanded better conditions and pay, start campaigning that union you subsidise to act as arbiter. But as long as the framework is there to exploit people, and individuals do not feel empowered enough to recognise the alternatives, inequality just gets perpetuated. When you are told day in day out that you are worth very little, eventually you start to believe it. For me, the saddest thing of all is the human labour that goes unvalued, and individuals who believe they can't do better, if they want to.

occupational hazards: precarious work

I want to talk a little bit about occupational hazards in the workplace. If you work in an office you might get the dreaded repetitive strain injury in your wrist, your posture might suffer, you'll probably put on weight. If you're a machinist, you might nick your finger. You don't really expect to encouter that many hazards in your job as a housekeeper. Ok, it's very unsanitary and stranger germs are the worst germs, but I look to look on the bright side and see it as an immune system boost.

However, a woman passed out last week and had to go to hospital in an ambulance.

The hotel management had complained that the grouting in the showers was very dirty, and this needed to be rectified by the housekeeping staff scrubbing at it with a bristle brush and...some harsh bleach. I spoke to the woman that passed out, and she said that she began to feel dizzy as soon as she started using it, but was just doing her job. 

On the one hand, I do feel that an adult has a responsibility to their self to not do anything that might unduly be harmful or dangerous, least of all end in a trip to the hospital. On the flip side, surely employers have a duty of care to their staff, to thoroughly examine the items and products they expect staff to use, and ensure things like this are reasonably avoided.

It makes me really sad to think that a company does not care enough for their employees to check the contents of hazardous chemicals before telling staff to use them in confined spaces. It makes me sadder still that employees do not feel empowered enough to speak out about the conditions they are expected to work within.  The doctor told her that, with frequent use, that chemical could harm your vital organs.

Some things are just not worth it.

everything was tired and nothing made sense

I have just finished a run of 5 consecutive days at my housekeeping job. When I came home (after a disappointing failed trip to a hospital far away to give a blood sample, too late, too late) I put on a load of washing, cleaned up to make the place shiny and new after our Airbnbers (not that they made a mess, I'm just an absolutist when it comes to feeling comfortable in my own space), and now I'm sitting with a pint glass of water (hydration is the key to success) and sore limbs.

5 days is the typical stretch anyone works, but my job is incredibly physically demanding. Not only is it timed to the last second, but you're also required to lug heavy things around and generally maintain a series of unnatural and uncomfortable positions for hours at a time (making beds when you're tall, no mean feat). I have no qualms about doing this 'precarious' unskilled work, money is money, and I need a quick fix solution before Autumn comes and my first step on the career ladder finally begins (more on that soon!). But it's mentally taxing, stressful, and tiring.

I cannot really emphasis enough how exhausted my body is. I may be stronger and fitter now than I was 6 weeks ago, but doing this work for any extended amount of time is a middle ago of chronic back and limb pain waiting to happen. I made a throwaway comment to the woman that trained me in that this was my 5th day in a row (usually our days are spaced out over the week, only 3 days a week), and how tired I was. She proceeded to tell me that she once worked 18 DAYS IN A ROW and that if you stay in the job long enough you'll work the whole month without a break. 

There's something incredibly sad, no, angering, about an industry that sets those conditions as something to be expected, and not, say, illegal. I'll be really glad to hand in my notice in a couple of months. I just feel bad for all the woman that work at that place (perpetually and patronisingly referred to as 'the girls' by the supervisors) and feel like they don't deserve any better.

precarious work

I want to talk a bit about my new job. Now maybe this won't be the type of post you're used to reading here, it shys away from my usual 'play it safe' subject matter, but I think it's an important topic to discuss.

When I first started this blog I was living in London, and engaged in what I would dub 'precarious work'. That means, engaged in a low-paying job with precarious conditions attached to it. These might range from a lack of benefits, lack of sick pay, no job security, no advance notice of shifts to work, working long hours, including evenings and weekends, for low pay. For me, the main factor that determines precarious work is the lack of recognition of your actual humanness from your employer. Expecting you to go above and beyond your job description, be unreflexively flexible, and give everything to a job that offers you nothing more than a bare living wage.

And now, I find myself in my new job, housekeeping in a hotel. The backstory to this is that, as a 'foreigner' in Denmark, or 'udlændinge' (alien) as they so affectionately call us, if you do not speak Danish you cannot work in most sectors. And this is a fact they will tell you quite bluntly, as they are wont to do here. So, cash strapped and looking for some kind of work to tide me over, I once again find myself in the kind of job that's just so easy to get, and luckily for me, is a step up from waitressing in that I don't have to talk to anyone or negotiate the whims and madness of customers on the regular. I do this kind of work mainly because, in the past, I've hated to be tied down to a desk or a fixed contract, so it's always been a choice, and a choice in which the positives outweighed the negatives. I've waitressed, worked in call centres, etc. not because I've had to, but because I've chosen to, for one reason or another.

In subsequent posts I'm going to talk about the nature of the job and how it compares to similar jobs I've done in other European countries. If you're interested in this sort of thing, please keep reading.