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 hand, had more options, especially in the tight labor market that existed at the time of this research. Why did they choose to stay in jobs that exposed them incessantly to class inequality and required them to subordinate themselves to—and to appear to care for—hotel guests? How did this inequality come to seem normal?
The answers to these questions lie partly in the characteristics of the interactive work I have laid out here. After all, front of house work is autonomous, varied, often challenging, and fairly well paid, at least relative to back of house work. But a more complete answer lurks in Joel's comment above, that rich people are not “entitled to anything they want.” As we will see, despite the hotel's call to provide unlimited labor, workers symbolically constituted guest entitlement as limited. They also constructed themselves as entitled in a variety of ways—to skill, to status, and to equal treatment. These constructions, as we will see, helped workers to reframe their own subordination while at the same time normalizing it. They also facilitated workers’ active investment in their work. And they often depended on the use of back of house workers as a foil. Throughout my discussion of these processes, I will highlight workers, like Elena, who withdrew consent when their strategies for managing their own subordination proved inadequate.
The characteristics of the hotels themselves and their managerial regimes helped to shape workers’ visions of themselves and others. Chapter 2 offers a more detailed discussion of both.
Epigraph: Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Book Division, from ELOISE by Kay Thompson. Drawings by Hilary Knight. Copyright © 1955 by Kay Thompson. Copyright © renewed 1983 by Kay Thompson. All rights reserved.
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