[Anonymous]

[VintageKrug]

Seems Park Plaza Hotels will be in the limelight this week.

Their contractor, Hotelcare, has been exposed by a BBC Newsnight investigation as systematically underpaying their cleaning staff – sometimes to the order of over one hundred pounds a week; not insignificant when you earn £250 per week at most, don’t speak English or start a new job and are new in the country being unsure of your own rights.

It is a scandal that a company should pay beneath minimum wage, and not recompense its workforce properly.

Hotelcare was apparently paying cleaners on the basis of the number of rooms cleaned and the time it believed the room *should* have been cleaned in, rather than the time it actually took.

Learn more here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8171318.stm

[Why_use_a_silly_name?]

I usually do not agree with your posts but this time you are absolutely on the money. I heard the report as I was driving home yesterday and my blood boiled. The systematic evasion of the minimum wage (I am quite sure that none of us would get out of bed for that level of pay, still less half of it, and that is the pay level we are talking about) to the detriment of what is effectively an underclass of low paid immigrant workforce which lacks any support or understanding of the British system is simple exploitation. For this to take place in establishments that charge hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds a night is a disgrace.

The multiplicity of agencies etc. that come between the employing hotel and the employed cleaner seems to be purposely designed to give each tier deniability of what the other tiers might be doing. A nice bit of naming-and-shaming of the hotels in question might work wonders.

Perhaps I am just old and cynical, but am I the only one who suspects that the relevant inspectors are deliberately underfunded and encouraged not to stick their noses in (until matters surface in the BBC)?

[VintageKrug]

The relevant inspectors are in fact much more likely to be overfunded, incompetent cronies of a bankrupt government. We have seen this in this at a national level with the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and we have seen it repeated at a local level in Haringey Council.

While focussed on penalising law abiding citizens by hiking taxes to an intolerable level and destroying our overseas competitive advantage, they have abandoned their own central tenet of fairness while they line their own coffers in a last gasp of grasping greed before being booted out in May 2010.

[Travelforus]

Agree with him or not VintageKrug has a way with words. Fantastic verbal destruction.

[Airpocket]

Unfortunately, the way the English legal system functions makes it nigh on impossible for the workers to get an equitable recourse. Expect some crusty, xenophobic judge to make a token ruling in favour of the workers.

[RBrown9]

Unfortunately this may well be the case. However, as customers, we certainly have the right to “vote with our feet” and avoid establishments with similar practices to that outlined (and I am sure there are many). With “Corporate Social Responsibility” high on the agenda, a good practice might be for hotel chains to have regular (external) reviews on their employment practices (or those of their subcontractors) and post the results of such reviews. Travel reviewers could also insist on seeing this information when reviewing or rating an establishment.

[VintageKrug]

I rather take the opposite approach, actually.

Much better to stay at the properties and be vocal about your dissatifaction about such policies, and engage the staff and senior management in dialogue about such issues.

Frequent Travellers are often invited to receptions by hotel GMs, and have a reasonable amount of credibility when seeking out a hotel GM to raise an issue.

I would encourage that approach, rather than simply avoiding a property; incentivising improvements by bringing in your business, subject to assurances, works better than the silent protest that is blacklisting a property.

Further removing business is likely to be counterproductive as hotel budgets are squeezed even further, potentially leading to the redundancy of cleaning staff.

[RBrown9]

You make a good point. I wonder how many corporate travel buyers consider the staff practices of hotels or chains when deciding whether to do business with them.

[VintageKrug]

Indeed, I like your idea of an “ethical” scale – rather like the “grades” handed out to restaurants in California which must be prominently displayed to inform consumer choice.

I wonder if such a grading process/institution exists?

[volleraux]

Looks like Hotelcare have been at this for a while – this article from 2005. Why have they been able to operate in this way for so long?

http://www.caterersearch.com/Articles/2005/06/23/306049/selling-people-short.html

[VintageKrug]

Hotelcare is obviosuly an immoral company, and I would urge those staying at Park Plaza hotels to make continue to sta there, but voice your opinions forcefully, asking to see the General Manager personally if possible, and esnuring he has taken action toensure this odious practice does not continue.

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