Class Acts. Rachel Sherman

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      TWO Managing Autonomy

      Luxury service, as we have seen, depends largely on the commitment of the workers who provide it. Managers thus face a difficult task. They must convince their employees, especially those in the front of the house, to go out of their way for guests, satisfying and surprising guests in largely intangible ways. The managers I interviewed and worked with were all too aware of this dilemma. Their chief complaint was that it was too hard to find workers, especially workers who would provide highlevel service. The food and beverage director at the Luxury Garden described his greatest challenge as “without a doubt the [worker] management aspect.” The general manager at the Royal Court told me his biggest problem was finding qualified labor; he said he didn't understand why it was “so bloody difficult” to get clients’ phone messages and packages straight, because “it's not brain surgery.”

      A tight local labor market exacerbated this problem. Most of my research took place in 2000, at the height of the national and local economic boom, which meant that many hotel workers had left to seek employment in other industries. Internal problems, including unpopular managers at the Luxury Garden and renovation at the Royal Court, had also prompted an exodus in each hotel. Alice, the head of human resources at the Luxury Garden, told me there had been a 34 percent turnover in 2000, which was high for the hotel. (She claimed it had been under 20 percent since 1993.) Alice named employee retention as one of her biggest challenges. Nicole, the Royal Court's human resources director, told me turnover had reached 43 percent in 1999 and was at 23 percent as of April 2000. The front desk staff, including line employees and managers, had been decimated. (When I started, almost all the front desk workers and front office managers had been at the hotel for less than two years.)¹

      Managers were similarly constrained by the requirements of interactive work. As we have seen, luxury service cannot be routinized because of workers’ discretion in the face of unpredictability. Coercive approaches would not work among interactive workers either, especially given the tight labor market. So what strategies did managers use to convince scarce autonomous workers to provide luxury service? In this chapter, I introduce the two hotels and compare their managerial regimes. Although managers faced many similar constraints and had similar options for regulating workers, the two hotels produced luxury service very differently. The hierarchically organized and highly regulated Luxury Garden offered professionalized service; the Royal Court provided more informal, friendly service in the context of flexible organization and lateral authority. These managerial regimes could not, in and of themselves, ensure worker cooperation and consent; rather, they provided different kinds of resources for workers in the constructions of selfhood that I explore throughout the book.

      THE HOTELS

      In many ways, the Luxury Garden and the Royal Court were alike. They strove to provide a comparable level of service, competed for many of the same clients, and faced similar recruitment and training difficulties. They were both fairly small (160 and 110 rooms, respectively), with worker-to-room ratios of over 1:1 (standard in luxury hotels). They had a similar organizational structure. (See appendix B for details.) Because the city's hotel industry was highly unionized, both hotels, which were nonunion, more or less adhered to the terms of the master contract that governed unionized hotels in terms of wages and disciplinary procedures (though Royal Court workers earned slightly less than unionized workers). Workers were paid hourly and scheduled on three daily eight-hour shifts. Benefits at both hotels included health care, lower room rates for workers and their friends and family, free food in an employee cafeteria, and free uniforms and uniform laundry. However, the hotels differed in their ownership and management structures, types of accommodations and service, characteristics of guests, types of workers, and their managerial regimes. Guest responses to the service were similarly positive but varied in character; reflecting contrasts in service styles, guests saw the Luxury Garden as “professional” and the Royal Court as “friendly.”Table 2 summarizes the differences between the hotels.

       The Luxury Garden

      The Luxury Garden was located in the city's business district, in an imposing skyscraper that also housed offices. A gold-coated doorman, positioned near carefully cultivated flowering plants, greeted guests. Inside, neatly uniformed white, Asian, and Latino workers, mostly older than thirty, stood behind the desk looking into the lobby, decorated in black granite with red and gold touches. The hotel's 160 rooms boasted a glorious view of the city; they were decorated with dark woods and Asian accents, such as bamboo and Chinese ceramics. Large bathrooms featured capacious tubs and sinks, as well as a separate shower, two kinds of bathrobes, and soft slippers. Like most luxury hotels, the Luxury Garden boasted twenty-four-hour room service, an award-winning restaurant, same-day laundry service, twice-daily maid service, packing and unpacking service on request, valet parking, and a complimentary chauffeur-driven house car in the mornings and evenings. A fruit or flower amenity awaited each new guest in the room. A business center, a fitness center, and a gift shop were located within the hotel.

TABLE 2 Characteristics of the Luxury Garden and the Royal Court

      The Luxury СКАЧАТЬ