"What we believe is that daily room cleaning is our arsenal to help fight the spread of Covid," said Nia Winston, general vice-president of Unite Here, the hotel and restaurant workers' union that represents more than 300,000 hospitality workers."Daily room cleaning is required in China and Hong Kong and other places that have successfully contained the virus.
"They are still busy," Ms Petit-Homme said."They don't have no respect for the housekeeping. We work very hard in the housekeeping, and now we do more work in the same time, and it's hard." Josh Herman, vice-president of marketing and public relations at the Fontainebleau, said the hotel's focus is on returning to former occupancy levels, enabling it to reemploy as many of its workers as possible.
Hotel owners and investors say they simply cannot afford to have all their housekeepers back at work full time and measures like checkout-only cleaning are meant to keep everyone safe. They say it's also what guests want. At many hotels, housekeeping jobs pay up to US$27 per hour, with health care benefits that cover workers' families. Many, like Nely Reinante, a housekeeper at the Hilton Hawaiian Village hotel on Waikiki Beach, live in fear of losing their jobs and not being able to replace them.