However, the hotel is not like the private home, in which the caring mother, the obedient and deferential female servant, and the professionalized male butler labor. In the hotel, no single person (mother or servant) produces the service. The client is not the employer, which is usually the case among domestic servants.50 Rather, this intangible feeling of having someone to care for and wait on the consumer is bureaucratized, emerging from a formal organization comprising layers of workers and managers doing a range of different jobs. The self-subordination required of workers is formally codified by managers, and in some cases their tasks are more limited than those of household workers.51 In the remainder of the chapter, I look at the complex division of labor in the hotel that underlies the provision of luxury service, including job characteristics, worker demographics, and the possibilities for managers to control workers and routinize work.52 I then analyze workers’ experience of self-subordination, which differs according to their placement in the hotel, setting up the rest of the book's focus on interactive workers.
PRODUCING SERVICE: AUTONOMY,
CONSTRAINT, AND INEQUALITY
The service theater of the hotel comprises a wide range of workers and jobs, a variation that is mirrored in the hotel's complex topography. Front desk agents and concierges stand all day behind a desk in the lobby, checking guests in and out and attending to their dinner reservations and unpredictable requests. Door attendants govern a narrow outdoor space between the hotel's front doors and the curb, loading and unloading guests’ luggage and keeping an eye out for meter readers. Valet parkers run or drive from the door to the garage and back, rarely entering the hotel. Bellpersons roam around the building, guiding brass carts piled high with guests’ bags through hallways and into elevators. Telephone operators and reservationists outfitted with headsets sit in windowless offices, staring at computers as they connect callers or discuss room availability. Housekeepers alternate between the small housekeeping offices, where their assignments and supplies are kept, and the floors where the rooms they clean are located, as they labor to finish their assigned quota. Restaurant servers shuttle between the hushed, intimate dining room and the loud, chaotic kitchen, while sweaty cooks and kitchen staff are confined behind the cooking line or next to the steamy dishwasher.
How do managers organize all these labor processes? They first split them into two categories: interactive and noninteractive positions. In the industry, the public areas of the hotel are known as the “front of the house” and are home to concierges, front desk agents, bellpersons, door attendants, valets, and restaurant servers. The private areas of the hotel are known as the “back of the house.” Here we find workers who rarely have contact with guests, such as room cleaners, turndown attendants, and laundry workers. In a gray area between the front and back of the house, we find what I call “semivisible” workers, who have limited face-to-face or exclusively telephonic contact with guests, including reservationists, telephone operators, room service workers, and housemen or runners.53 This division of labor is defined in terms of worker visibility to guests.
Less obviously, these jobs also vary according to the tangibility of the product. Workers in the front of the house provide most of the elements of interactive service, which consists mainly of intangible emotional labor (personalization, needs anticipation and compliance, and deference) as well as visible physical labor. Workers in the back of the house, in contrast, primarily produce the noninteractive elements of recognition, mainly invisible physical labor. Their products—clean rooms, turned-down beds, hot food, and so on—are tangible (though usually not portable, as most material goods are, because they cannot be taken off the premises).
Wages and working conditions vary between these two groups, as we will see in more detail in subsequent chapters (also see appendix C for wages in my sites). Back of house workers are paid less than front of house workers as a rule (one or two dollars less per hour in my sites). Many interactive workers regularly received tips (and sometimes commissions), which was less common for back of house workers (except for room service servers). All of these differences have consequences for workers’ experience of work. As we have seen, back of house workers are more highly regulated and tightly supervised, while front of house workers have more autonomy and control over their work. At the same time, invisible workers are not required to interact often with guests, while interactive workers must offer more self-subordination.54 Table 1 summarizes the key characteristics of these areas.
This division of labor maps onto demographic distinctions.55 (See appendix C.) Front of house workers are usually white (though bellpersons and door attendants, who perform more physical labor, are often men of color). Workers in the back of the house are generally people of color, often immigrants from a wide range of countries. These distinctions held at the Royal Court, though the norm for front of house workers did not hold at the Luxury Garden; there, those workers were more diverse, many of them Asian and Asian American. Back of house jobs are usually stratified by gender (turndown attendants and room cleaners are always women), as are certain front of house positions (bellpersons, valets, and door attendants are almost always men). However, both men and women perform front desk and concierge work.56
The Back of the House: Invisible Workers
Workers in the back of the house provide few of the interactive elements of service, for their primary role is to furnish invisible physical labor. Room cleaners and turndown attendants display labor by doing the myriad tasks involved in both morning and evening maid service. As I have suggested, the maintenance of the room's aesthetic, particular to luxury service, indicates labor. Luxurious appointments create extra work for housekeepers not found in nonluxury hotels; they change the covers of down duvets every day, replace ten towels, tie sashes of bathrobes, and so on.57 These workers also implemented guest preferences by leaving special amenities or objects in the rooms, but they did this on the order of managers.
TABLE 1 Comparison of Front and Back of House Work Characteristics
aConcierge, front desk worker, door attendant, bellperson, valet.
bRoom cleaner, turndown attendant, laundry worker.
cReservationist, telephone operator, runner, room service server and order taker.
dThese characteristics vary according to the hotel's location.
Hence, as I have said, the product these workers provide is tangible. As a result, their work is easily routinized. Room cleaners and turndown attendants are given a certain number of rooms to clean or turn down each day, which for room cleaners rarely varies. Management gives workers extremely detailed specifications on what the room should look like, including how many hangers belong in the closet, how to tie the sashes of bathrobes, and where to place amenities and towels in the bathroom or items on the desk and bedside table. Room cleaners often train one another and over time develop their own preferences as to when to do different tasks and which implements to use. Once they