At age 62, Consuelo Escorsia, a cleaner at the Marriott Marquis in downtown San Francisco, can practically see her retirement when she closes her eyes. Once she’s done with her career, she yearns to return home to El Salvador’s southern coast.
After giving more than 35 years to the hotel, she wants to slow down. Instead, ever since the business reopened after Covid shutdowns, her workload has tripled due to staffing cuts — causing her body to break down just as she’s about to reach her dream.
“The way they’re treating us, it’s as if they don’t see us as human anymore,” Escorsia said, clutching her wrist after a morning shift last week. In the past five years, she’s had three surgeries because of what the work has done to her body over time. Changing dozens of tall trash cans a day has only gotten harder with age, Escorsia said.
“I wouldn’t have worked for people like this had I known this was how it was going to be,” she added.
Thousands of hotel workers in the city are similarly stretched. Servers are handling more tables, doormen are buried in bags, and cooks are swamped by orders. As San Francisco continues to stumble through its uneven post-pandemic recovery, the pace doesn’t seem to be letting up for this critical workforce.
Staffing challenges are a key factor. With hotel occupancies down across the board, skeleton crews are, in effect, tasked with operating many of these giant properties. Early in the pandemic, workers bit the bullet for the sake of reopening. Three years later, they’re worried the “new normal” is here to stay.
As a result, the lead negotiators at Unite Here Local 2 — a union that represents some 3,000 hotel workers in downtown San Francisco — are urging members to consider a strike vote next month, as their contract was supposed to expire in August 2022 before getting a two-year pandemic extension.
Unionized hotel workers are asking for higher wages, continuing healthcare benefits and more reasonable workloads. But the current round of negotiations with Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt suggests the employers are “going in the opposite direction,” union spokesperson Ted Waechter said.
“We’re already fighting an uphill battle to get people back into the city,” Waechter said. “If guests keep paying more and more for less and less, then they’re not going to want to return.”
Outsize impact
Even though hotel staff make up only 11% of the city’s workforce, the industry contributes an outsize amount of tax revenue, San Francisco’s chief economist, Ted Egan, said. The tourism and hospitality sector is the second-largest industry contributing to the city’s budget, behind technology and related office industries.
Hospitality workers work in-person full time, while most office workers in the city are on a hybrid or remote schedule, leaving a hollowed-out downtown core as a result. According to Placer.ai, which tracks foot traffic using cell phone data, San Francisco is as much as 50% behind June 2019 in terms of office visits.
Hotels are the largest employers of San Franciscans who don’t have a four-year college degree, Egan said. For workers like Escorsia, that means the industry — when successful — offers a viable pathway to the middle class, with a low barrier to entry.
Should the members of Unite Here Local 2 vote to strike, it could be open-ended or for a limited duration. In 2018, for example, Marriott hotel workers went on strike for more than two months before reaching a deal for higher wages.
“Our negotiating position remains that ‘one job should be enough,’ ” Waecher said. “Right now, that is no longer the case for many of our members.”
Representatives of Hilton and Marriott, who are negotiating with the union as a bloc, did not respond to requests for comment. But Michael D’Angelo, head of labor relations for Hyatt had this to say about current negotiations.
“Our colleagues are the heart of our business, and their wellbeing is always a top priority,” D’Angelo said. “We look forward to negotiating a fair contract with Unite Here Local 2 and recognize the contributions of our employees.”
If the city’s hotel tax revenues are any indication, the hotel operators are likely arguing that lower occupancies justify reductions.
In the first year of shutdown, San Francisco saw an unprecedented drop of 90% in hotel room tax revenue from pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the mayor’s budget office. The most recently reported figure, $253 million, is barely half of 2019’s $408 million.
Making matters worse, the budget office doesn’t foresee hotel tax revenues returning to pre-pandemic levels until after the fiscal year ending in 2028.
“As hotel services change, the work to be done will need to be redefined,” Susan Roe, professor of hospitality and tourism management at San Francisco State University, said.
‘Do more with less’
When Lydia Jackson started the manager-in-training program at the Fairmont San Francisco in 2016, the Moscone Center was undergoing renovations, so the city’s packed events calendar migrated to major hotels downtown.
The nonstop action, headlined by events such as the annual Dreamforce conference, turned the city into one of the country’s most lucrative hotel destinations. As a result, positions managing banquets and events, like the one Jackson eventually held, became highly sought-after.
She eventually took a job at the Four Seasons San Francisco. In 2019, the best year ever for the city’s hotel industry, the hotel employed up to 12 managers across six divisions, Jackson said. When the Four Seasons reopened after nearly 18 months of pandemic closure, Jackson was the only manager of that group to return, she said.
Others couldn’t wait around and took jobs elsewhere. “It was like reopening a brand-new hotel,” Jackson recalled. A spokesperson for the Four Seasons San Francisco declined to comment.
Like Escorsia, Jackson found herself assigned to work that previously would have been outside her scope, like managing tculinary and restaurant operations instead of just organizing events.
“Between the managers and the unionized workers, we set aside a lot of differences for the sake of getting the hotel reopened,” Jackson said. “It was a great learning and bonding experience, but it was by no means sustainable.”
“It’s now three years later,” Jackson added. “We were never meant to keep living in that mode.”
After more than a year of leading the Four Seasons reopening, Jackson started to burn out. The pre-pandemic shifts were brutal too, but at least then the five-star hotel was fully staffed and winning accolades. Now, despite employees’ best efforts, quality has begun to deteriorate.
“The reopening message they kept pitching us was: ‘The best is yet to come,’ ” Jackson said. “But in reality, it was ‘do more with less’ — and that’s just demoralizing if you’re not getting rewarded for it.”
It’s been a year and a half since Jackson left what she once called her dream job. Now, both of the Four Seasons hotels in San Francisco are listed for sale after their owners defaulted on a commercial loan taken out right before the pandemic.
‘Worth fighting for’
A majority of Escorsia’s colleagues are first-generation immigrants just like her, with a large segment coming from China or Latin America.
The job, despite its pains, is still worth it, Escorsia said, because of the rare healthcare benefits and pension bargained for in previous negotiations. There just aren’t many other jobs in the city that can offer that, she said.
Because the first available shifts go to union members based on seniority, the much-needed extra hands entering the industry these days are washing out faster as the work has become more scarce and demanding, Escorsia said.
Nicholas Javier, a fourth-generation San Franciscan, says he faces the same sort of challenges at the historic Westin St. Francis, where he’s worked as a restaurant server for more than a decade.
Since the hotel reopened after the pandemic, Javier gets significantly less time to interact with guests due to the increased workload. “It shifted from hospitality to more turn-and-burn,” he said.
Alongside Escorsia, he is on the union’s bargaining committee. Without disclosing figures — which both parties agreed not to do publicly — Javier said that something like switching out healthcare insurance providers could be catastrophic.
“We keep hearing about how important this industry is to the city, but yet, we’re not given that same respect,” Javier said. “These jobs are worth fighting for.”
Across from the Westin St. Francis on Geary Street, Jackson found a new role as director of events at Mastro’s Steakhouse, where her work-life balance has greatly improved, she says.
Because the restaurant opened only a few months before the pandemic, its rooftop terrace is one of the “most beautifully kept secrets” in downtown, according to Jackson.
Even though Jackson left the hotel industry, the Arkansas native still beams when she talks about hospitality and why San Francisco and other cities need it more than ever.
“I wouldn’t have traded my experiences for the world,” she said. “But if we don’t start changing course, then we’re going to lose what made these [hotels] so great.”