Journals of a Hotel Manager

With the economy doing so poorly and Mr. Owner breathing down my neck about cost-cutting, I plan to hold a meeting with the union tomorrow to see if we could reduce some head count or hours. The union here controls every single member of staff, except for the expatriates. That’s right, even all my local division heads belong to the union.

Union meetings tend to be long and intense. Many of the union leaders happen to be line staff such as a dishwasher or a housekeeper. Their English is not fluent but their ideas are numerous. Sometimes the meetings go on for twice as long due to the back and forth translation so a buleh like me can be part of the negotiation.

Through gossiping I heard of two scary incidents between the union and expat general managers. One of them happened not far from our hotel. It was a small European based hotel. The GM somehow upset the union and the negotiation fell through. In broad daylight, the GM was jostled from the meeting room and pushed into the swimming pool, witnessed by his guests sunbathing on loungers. The poor guy tried to come ashore but every time his hands reached the edge of the pool a staff would push him back into the water. This lasted for over an hour until the exhausted GM agreed to the union’s demands.

Another true story happened in the capital city at a famous international hotel. Again the negotiation between management and union went sour. All the expats, the GM, the chef, and the F&B director etc. were herded into the executive office. The doors were boarded up and the expats were left in the executive office for six days. Luckily it was just before festive season. There were plenty of hampers in the office intended for top customers in the city. The expats lived off the cookies and fruits for those six days. Meanwhile, the rioting staff sent all the guests away and turned off the central power (just imagine the spoilage in the cooler and storage). They brought their families to camp out in the lobby, cooked fried rice on kerosene burners, gambled the entire time away, and basically trashed the lobby in an insane party.

The GM managed to contact the embassy of his home country from a cell phone and reported his unhappy misfortune. That didn’t really help since the embassy had no jurisdiction over a private property in their host country. But after pulling some strings and seeing the situation was not to be resolved, the local police stormed the hotel one night and chased the campers out. Needless to say, the riot leaders were dismissed, union demands thrown out, and the expats were released from their temporary prison with no physical injury.

An even more bizarre postscript to this sad story was that one staff member who took the failure of this union negotiation too seriously jumped off the hotel building in protest.

I know my staff are not that extreme and I have full confidence that I will not end up in a pool or imprisoned in my own office. But it is sometimes challenging for me, at the end of a head-splitting union meeting of 8 hours, to smile in agreement with guests, “Yes, aren’t the staff here wonderful?”