"YOU are a front line member of the team." That's what all new "accommodation assistants" at Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel are told. Agnes Keogh, accommodation manager at the Shelbourne, was firm. "The days when accommodation staff were kept away upstairs behind closed doors are long gone and labels like `housekeeper' or `chamber maid' have been done away with. Accommodation assistants are as much apart of the hotel's service team as are the door men or the receptionists. They undergo training in all aspects of customer care; and social skills are very important."
Whatever the label or the esteem ink which it is held, when the pillow hits the bed, the job is still very much about perfectionist bed making and hard, hard work. Anne Marie Byrne, who has been "customer caring" since April, took her caddie in one hand and me by the other for a morning on the "Kildare Corridor" on the fourth floor.
Anne Marie used to work in a factory in Carlow but was laid off. Having replied to an advertisement in a Sunday newspaper for accommodation recruits at the Shelbourne, the 19 year old is now successfully "assisting" in the accommodation of 13 rooms of guests a day.
Everything has to be perfect," she tells me by way of explanation for her rejecting a sheet which, though clean, is apparently too wrinkled to be countenanced on a Shelbourne bed. "The customer might think it had been slept on."
She demonstrates the art of "hospital fold" sheet tucking before carrying out the basic, exacting clean up which every room gets.
Pillow case folds are faced away from the door so guests don't see them when they enter; all woodwork is polished; Trust House Forte magazines are arranged neatly on the glass topped table; the mini bar is wiped clean inside and out; writing paper and pencils are restocked; the bath and sink washed and dried; toiletries replenished; towels and Shelbourne robes replaced; mirrors polished; plants watered; all floors vacuumed, and finally Ann Marie gets down on her knees and wipes the bathroom floor clean.
EACH day she has to "pull out" two of her 13 rooms. All furniture is pulled out from the walls, skirting boards are scrubbed, lamp shades are damp wiped, brass is polished and the carpet under and behind all furniture is vacuumed.
Every facet of every room is attended to, down to little user friendly pleats being folded into the first section of the toilet paper. Anne Marie checks over the room one last time before she ticks it off the list she was assigned at 7 a.m.
"You may as well make sure it's perfect because a supervisor checks it after you and if it's not right she'll only get you to do it again," she says.
She doesn't feel it's over the top. "If you were paying that much you'd expect it to be perfect." The cheapest room at the Shelbourne is £172 per night plus IS per cent service charge, not including breakfast.
Her work is harder at the weekends. "It's all families at the weekends, and stag parties. Some of them are so messy. During the week it's business men, paid for by companies. One man doesn't make any mess. He'll just sleep and go."
She works a 39 hour week and earns "roughly £1.40 per week gross". She also gets a cut of the service charge. "Some weeks the service charge is almost more than the wages. In the summer it's very good." Wages, service charge distribution and breaks are worked out in conjunction with SIPTU, to which most employees of the Shelbourne belong. The Shelbourne has been unionised since 1918.
Accommodation assistants at the Shelbourne get one half hour and two 15 minute breaks a day. A lunch is provided every day and Anne Marie also gets six weeks' paid leave per year. She earns it. It is hard physical work.
"When I first started I thought I'd never get up to 13 rooms a day. We have 13 days training with a supervisor. We do one room on the first and two on the second, until we get to 13. I was so sore and tired at first. But you get used to it, like training for a marathon. You get your speed up and it gets easier. One woman has been here 23 years and she is so fast."
Norman Croke of SIPTU says that the hotels that invest in training recruits and pay fair rates are often the most commercially successful and well regarded. He names hotels that pay accommodation workers "as little as £20 a day. In the same hotels there are annual staff turnovers of 100 per cent. Workers won't be loyal to an employer that shows no loyalty to them."
The worst thing about the work, says Ann Marie, is the solitude. Supervisor Christina Galvin explains that they work better alone. "I've seen hotels where they work in pairs but I think they hold each other back and they pick up each other's bad habits."
There is little scope for promotion for Anne Marie as she has not done the RTC hotel management course that her supervisor, Christina Galvin, has. However, she does not see herself staying in hotel work in the long term, hoping instead to study theology. "It's handy work though, especially for women with families or for students in the summer," Anne Marie adds. And even if her days are spent wandering the corridors alone, there is always the knowledge that she is on the same team as the Shelbourne chefs and bar tenders to get her through the shift.
