Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ a first-class hotel, the staff that works there generally looks you in the eye when they walk by you in the hall. And when someone comes up and asks you, ‘Is there anything I can get for you?’ or ‘Are you enjoying your stay?’ they look you right in the eye, and they're really asking that question as opposed to saying that ‘I have to walk into the lobby at an eighteen-minute interval and see if anybody wants anything.’” Martha, whose computer had been stolen at a midrange hotel, compared the distant reaction of the workers there with the more genuine response she imagined she would have had at a luxury property:

      It was really sort of an upsetting event. And I thought the difference, in retrospect, between if my computer had been stolen in the lobby of the Four Seasons as opposed to the [Hotel X], the people at the Four Seasons would have been, like, slashing their wrists! [Laughs.] You know? And the people at the [Hotel X] were like, “Well, our insurance is five hundred dollars, and that's it.” So, it's a difference.

      By the same token, guests did not like workers to be overly formal or aloof. As Shirley put it when describing a hotel she had not enjoyed, “There was a formality there where I didn't feel welcomed in any kind of intimate way…. It was a coolness.” Violations of the sense of authenticity, as well as a sense of rote behavior, rupture the guest's sense that her individual self is being recognized.

      MOTHER OR SERVANT? CARE AND SUBORDINATION

      Horst Schulze, the former president of Ritz-Carlton, described the findings of a study his company had conducted on guest desires: “The first results that came back said that the guests wanted to feel at home, but I didn't believe that. So we did a further study and found out that what they really wanted was to feel like they did when they were in their mother's house.” Gilbert explains, “This meant that they wanted an environment where nothing went wrong: light bulbs didn't blow out and food wasn't burnt.”⁴³ Schulze might more accurately have spoken of a fantasy mother's house, of course, as few real mothers can provide an environment where nothing goes wrong. Like an idealized mother, the luxury hotel provides a sense of nurture, noting all individual preferences and quirks, anticipating and fulfilling needs, and showering the guest with genuine care and unlimited labor. As we have seen, this is largely what guests value in their hotel experience.

      By the same token, luxury service also involves some of the elements of paid “care work” as it is defined in the literature on socially necessary work, such as child, health, and elder care.⁴⁴ As a home health care aide defined good care, for example, “It's not always the clean bed, it's not always some food or medication, but it's a smile or I'll get that for you or I'll do that for you.”⁴⁵ In fact, many of the intangible components of care that compose luxury service are precisely those that are eliminated in the rationalization of other kinds of care, especially elder and health care.⁴⁶ In the hotel, however, these components are a primary source of profit—they differentiate a hundred-dollar room from a four-hundred-dollar room—and management thus emphasizes them through standards and rewards. Using standards, managers make explicit the components of care that are mystified in family settings or characterized as an intuitive “mother's wit” in nursing homes.⁴⁷ They also encourage workers to develop ongoing relationships, often seen to characterize care, with frequent guests.⁴⁸

      But there is, of course, a crucial difference between hotel workers and these other kinds of workers. Mothers have power over children, and even workers in traditional caring occupations exert some authority over their physically or emotionally dependent charges, who are usually children or elderly or infirm adults. But hotel workers lack this power, at least explicitly. Indeed, their relation to guests is in many ways more analogous to that between domestic servants and their employers than to the relation between mothers and children or paid caregivers and other kinds of dependents. Two kinds of racialized, gendered domestic servant tropes are relevant here: the female servant of color who typically does housework and sometimes child care, and the butler (or valet), usually a white man performing personal and household services.

      The image of the butler connotes professional, skilled, unobtrusive service, while the female domestic brings to mind overtly subordinated labor; both of these dimensions are visible in luxury service. Furthermore, the deference, willingness to serve, and needs anticipation that are implicit in the work of both types of servants are codified and emphasized in the hotel.⁴⁹ Also like household servants, workers in hotels are required to create client entitlement by subordinating themselves. By drawing on images of maternal care, guests interpret workers as exerting power over them (and, as we shall see in later chapters, they are sometimes afraid of workers). But, of course, guests are entitled to more personal attention, more legitimation of self, and more labor than those who serve them. Guests are entitled to recast all desires as needs, to consume the unlimited labor of others while not performing labor themselves, and to be recognized in their individuality while not reciprocally recognizing that of workers. And, like domestic servitude, luxury service depends on unequal allocation of resources, for its consumers can afford it while its producers cannot.

      However, the hotel is not like the private home, in which the caring mother, the obedient and deferential female servant, and the professionalized male butler labor. In the hotel, no single person (mother or servant) produces the service. The client is not the employer, which is usually the case among domestic servants.⁵⁰ Rather, this intangible feeling of having someone to care for and wait on the consumer is bureaucratized, emerging from a formal organization comprising layers of workers and managers doing a range of different jobs. The self-subordination required of workers is formally codified by managers, and in some cases their tasks are more limited than those of household workers.⁵¹ In the remainder of the chapter, I look at the complex division of labor in the hotel that underlies the provision of luxury service, including job characteristics, worker demographics, and the possibilities for managers to control workers and routinize work.⁵² I then analyze workers’ experience of self-subordination, which differs according to their placement in the hotel, setting up the rest of the book's focus on interactive workers.

      PRODUCING SERVICE: AUTONOMY,

      CONSTRAINT, AND INEQUALITY

      The service theater of the hotel comprises a wide range of workers and jobs, a variation that is mirrored in the hotel's complex topography. Front desk agents and concierges stand all day behind a desk in the lobby, checking guests in and out and attending to their dinner reservations and unpredictable requests. Door attendants govern a narrow outdoor space between the hotel's front doors and the curb, loading and unloading guests’ luggage and keeping an eye out for meter readers. Valet parkers run or drive from the door to the garage and back, rarely entering the hotel. Bellpersons roam around the building, guiding brass carts piled high with guests’ bags through hallways and into elevators. Telephone operators and reservationists outfitted with headsets sit in windowless offices, staring at computers as they connect callers or discuss room availability. Housekeepers alternate between the small housekeeping offices, where their assignments and supplies are kept, and the floors where the rooms they clean are located, as they labor to finish their assigned quota. Restaurant servers shuttle between the hushed, intimate dining room and the loud, chaotic kitchen, while sweaty cooks and kitchen staff are confined behind the cooking line or next to the steamy dishwasher.

      How do managers organize all these labor processes? They first split them into two categories: interactive and noninteractive positions. In the industry, the public areas of the hotel are known as the “front of the house” and are home to concierges, front desk agents, bellpersons, door attendants, valets, and restaurant servers. The private areas of the hotel are known as the “back of the house.” Here we find workers who rarely have contact with guests, such as room cleaners, turndown attendants, and laundry workers. In a gray area between the front and back of the house, we find what I call “semivisible” workers, who have limited face-to-face or exclusively telephonic contact with guests, including reservationists, telephone operators, room service workers, and housemen or runners.⁵³ This division of labor is defined in terms of worker visibility СКАЧАТЬ