Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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СКАЧАТЬ of workers to guests. Interactive workers in my sites were more aware of the structural asymmetry than their invisible counterparts and much more responsible for the self-subordination.

      Back of house workers, most of whom were immigrants from developing countries, were more disadvantaged structurally in relation to guests than their front of house counterparts, who earned more money, enjoyed greater job opportunities, and usually did not face racial discrimination. But these back of house workers had less direct contact with either structural or interactive inequality in the course of their work. They knew that the guests were wealthy, of course, but they were not constantly confronted with evidence of that wealth. In both hotels, housekeepers I worked with were unaware of the room rates or believed them to be lower than they actually were. It is unlikely that these workers were cognizant of the expense of the belongings they found in the rooms, if they even had time to notice them, which in my experience they did not.⁶⁶ They rarely commented on guests’ wealth. Also, because they had little contact with guests, these workers did not have to enact the self-subordination characteristic of luxury interactions. For back of house workers, then, inequality was obscured.

      Some semivisible workers, such as telephone operators and runners, were likewise rarely confronted with either structural or interactive inequality. Others, however, did know about guest spending. Room service workers knew how much the meals cost, and they occasionally commented on the exorbitant prices of the food or wine that guests ordered. Reservationists were well aware of the hotel's high room rates. But because they performed little interactive recognition work, most semi-visible workers were insulated from the subordination characteristic of visible work. The scope of guest requests was usually quite narrow. Furthermore, routines protected these workers from having to manifest extreme deference, giving them some power in the interaction. They rarely had to legitimate outrageous behavior or demands. Reservationists also tended to interact with travel agents or guests’ assistants at least as often as with the guests themselves and thus could withhold deferential treatment.

      In the front of the house, in contrast, interaction required workers to face disparities in wealth between themselves and the guests more directly. Front desk workers, who handled guests’ accounts, knew how much the guests often spent on their rooms, their food, and other services in the hotel. Concierges procured extremely expensive products and services outside the hotel; guests in my sites spent hundreds of dollars on tickets to the theater, symphony, or sporting events, as well as on meals, flowers, massages, and travel. Concierges knew where guests ate, shopped, and pursued expensive recreational pastimes such as golfing. They sent cars to pick up guests from their private planes or directed them to restaurants where they could buy three-hundred-dollar bottles of Cristal. Doormen and bellmen also saw the guests’ expensive cars and luggage and were familiar with the high price of the car-and-driver services guests often used. Thus, guest wealth was by no means obscured to front of house workers and some semivisible ones.

      Front of house workers also enacted interactive self-subordination to a much greater degree than other workers, deferring to guests, anticipating and responding to their every need, customizing interactions, and transgressing limits for them. Workers in these jobs must subordinate their own selves to those of the guests and restrain impulses to say what they really think.

      But despite this increased knowledge and experience of unequal entitlements, inequality was normalized for most of these workers. In their conversations about guests and their desires, demands, and behaviors, workers constantly invoked guests’ wealth. They bandied about numbers in the hundreds and thousands of dollars without batting an eye. However, they rarely critiqued or voiced discomfort with either the material inequalities between themselves and guests or the subordinating imperatives of their jobs (although workers sometimes judged individual guests for behaviors related to their wealth, as we will see in chapter 4). Indeed, in coding my field notes I became frustrated with the lack of explicit mentions of the guests’ wealth in a critical vein.

      Interactive workers discussed disparity and subordination only because I mentioned it in answering their questions about my research. Joel, a Royal Court doorman in his early forties, asked about my project, and I mentioned that I was interested in the disparity between workers and guests. He seemed confused, so I asked, “Do you ever think about that black Jag parked at the curb and wonder why you don't have one?” He responded, “That has never crossed my mind.” He told me, “Sometimes people can be rich and think they're entitled to anything they want, and I know that's not true.” But otherwise, he said, he did not think about it.

      Contrast that experience to a conversation I had in the Royal Court locker room with Millie, a young woman who had just been hired as a hostess in the restaurant. I asked how she liked it. She responded that, in comparison to her last restaurant job, “here, you have to kiss a lot of ass.” I was surprised, because I had never heard anyone voice this imperative so openly.

      It was not coincidental that Millie was struck by this during her first few days of working in the hotel. I came to see that many workers went through a process in which guests’ wealth and the imperatives of luxury service came to seem normal; it was apparent without being problematic. The restaurant manager at the Luxury Garden told me, “It's interesting to watch how the staff evolve over time. At first they worry about nickel-and-diming the guests, until they realize that the guest doesn't even look.” I asked Sarah, a reservationist who had held her job for thirteen years, if she thought about how much the clients were spending. She said, “I used to think about how these people are spending my monthly rent to stay for one night.” But, she said, “they can afford it, so it doesn't matter.”

      Other longtime workers also invoked this kind of relativism, saying, “It's not a lot of money to them.” Annie, a part-time college student in her early twenties, told me one evening over drinks that she did not think about the high rates guests paid. She said, “It's all relative. To them it's not that much; to me it would be a lot.” In this way they constituted guests as members of another universe, where money has different meanings. This was one kind of discourse I heard in the hotel about wealth acquired over time. I, too, went through a similar process. I had been fascinated by managers’ stories of wealthy guests and outrageous demands, but soon after actually beginning work, I ceased to notice them.

      Elena, a young, well-liked assistant manager who had studied hospitality management in college and had worked at the Luxury Garden for about a year, was the only person in either hotel who articulated the critical stance that I had expected to be more common. One day in the locker room she told me she was thinking seriously of leaving the industry. She said she was tired of her work and that it seemed meaningless. She commented that guests “put so much energy into getting an upgrade,” oblivious to an earthquake in India or homeless people in the United States. She described them as “clueless” and told me she didn't want her job to be to “make sure that assholes enjoy their stay.” At one time, she said, she had been committed to providing good service, but “now I don't care.” She made fun of the idea of “wowing” guests. A couple of weeks later, Elena told me again that she thought it was “silly to care about rich people getting everything they want.” In these comments, she linked the consumption of luxury service to larger social concerns and to individual entitlement associated with class inequality. The process of normalization had stopped working for her. As she began to question the inequality inherent in her work, Elena's investment in her job diminished. She became more and more unhappy and eventually left the hotel and the hospitality industry. Thus, the breakdown of normalization and the withdrawal of consent were closely intertwined. The question I will address in much of the rest of this book is why this breakdown and withdrawal happened so rarely.

      This question is especially salient for interactive workers. It is not hard to see why back of house workers rarely contested their working conditions or left their jobs, given their unfavorable labor market position and limited skills. And for them, structural inequality was obscured, and self-subordination to guests was virtually nonexistent. Better-educated front of house workers, on the other СКАЧАТЬ