United Voice News
Melbourne flagship hotels exposed
Some of Melbourne’s landmark hotels are among those exposed in a new report in which Melbourne hotel room attendants say they are being subjected to punishing workloads, stolen wages, intimidation and bullying.
Room attendants are calling on hotel management to work with them to solve these problems but Melbourne’s Langham hotel has refused.
“This is one of Melbourne’s top hotels and it should be setting an example to the rest of the industry,” Jess Walsh, State Secretary of LHMU, the Hotel Union, said.
“Instead the Langham hotel has refused to even meet with room attendants to discuss solutions to these issues.”
“Guests, paying as much as $1,500 a night for luxury rooms, will be shocked to learn of the high personal toll for the people who keep them clean and well presented. The conditions exposed in this report are a stain on our city’s proud international reputation.”
“It’s time the Langham respected the workers that have helped make it so successful,” Walsh said.
The report, Heartbreak Hotels: The Crisis Inside Melbourne’s Luxury Hotels, was based on a survey of 330 room attendants who work at 23 of our best hotels, was launched today by former Victorian premier Joan Kirner.
The report found that some of Melbourne’s best hotels are underpaying individual workers by as much as $10,000 a year. It was produced by the Victorian Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Coalition and LHMU, the Hotels Union.
Room attendants get as little as 15 minutes to clean a room after guests checkout, a job that requires about 45 minutes to do properly. Some hotels are using bullying and intimidation to pressure staff into working back beyond the end of their shift, for which they are often not paid.
“If we don’t stay back to finish the rooms they dock our pay from us. It’s very scary so we just stay back ‘til we finish rather than speak up,” said one room attendant.
Some room attendants allege that on some occasions they have been pressured into doing up to two hours unpaid overtime at the end of shifts. Those who refuse fear dismissal or having their pay being docked.
“They only ever pay us for five hours, no matter how long we stay back,” a room attendant at said.
The picture is just as bleak at the Langham, long acknowledged as one of Melbourne’s great hotels, where half of all full time room attendants surveyed have been injured.
“Management does not give us enough time to clean rooms but say we should have them finished. It’s not fair,” said a Langham room attendant.
