BALTIMORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism is currently investigating the cleanliness of Marriott’s luxury hotel rooms in China. UNITE HERE, the union for North America’s hotel workers, has offered to help by arranging a meeting with the real experts: Marriott housekeepers.
The Ministry’s investigation was sparked by a viral video which exposed poor room cleaning practices at luxury hotels in China. Several high-end Marriott hotels were shown in the video, including the Ritz-Carlton Shanghai Pudong, Bvlgari Shanghai, Le Royal Méridien Shanghai, the Sheraton Guiyang, and the Sheraton Nanchang.
UNITE HERE has asked Chinese representatives to sit down with housekeepers at a consulate to describe the impact of Marriott’s “Green Choice” program, which leaves rooms without housekeeping service for days at a time, on their lives and on room cleanliness. The union also shared its report about the program.
“Dirt and trash can accumulate when rooms are not serviced for multiple days. But housekeepers are not given any extra time to clean these dirtier and hard to clean rooms,” explained Jeff Nelson, Deputy Director at UNITE HERE. “The testimony from housekeepers about the impact of Marriott’s program will be highly relevant to the Ministry’s investigation.”
Housekeepers have described what it is like cleaning a hotel room because of Marriott’s Green Choice program: “I’m working in excruciating pain. I have all kinds of ailments since I started doing this work,” said Evelina Cravens, a housekeeper at the Marriott Union Square in San Francisco. “Green Choice is going to run us all out. We have to rush so fast and do so much, we’re injuring ourselves.”
5,200 Marriott workers in the US are on strike. One of the central issues of the strike is Marriott’s Green Choice program.
For more information, visit OneJob.org and MarriottChinaObserver.org.
About UNITE HERE
UNITE HERE represents 270,000 members working in the hotel, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, distribution, laundry, transportation, and airport industries in the U.S. and Canada including 17,000 employed by Marriott International.