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Nashville’s hospitality workers, who are predominantly Latina, Egyptian, and African American women, are some of the most routinely-exploited workers in the city. In 2013, after years of wage theft fights at hotels, Workers’ Dignity members voted to launch Just Hospitality, a multi-year campaign to qualitatively improve wages and conditions among the city’s cleaning workers. And once we began, things changed quickly.

From 2015 to 2019, cleaning workers at 13 hotels, Regal Cinemas, and Target department stores won over $888,000 in wage increases. Hotel housekeepers formed worker committees and took direct action to improve pay, reduce the number of hotel rooms they had to clean, remove abusive managers, and win back wages they said were stolen by exploitative cleaning agencies or the hotels directly.

Workers won wage increases - and in some cases reduction of the number of rooms to clean - by employers at the Super 8 Airport, Courtyard Marriott at Vanderbilt, Homewood Suites by Hilton Nashville Vanderbilt West End, Sheraton Downtown, Comfort Inn Midtown, Best Western Music Row, DoubleTree by Hilton Downtown, Homewood Suites by Hilton Nashville Vanderbilt West End, Homewood Suites Downtown, Hyatt Downtown, Courtyard Marriott Downtown, Hilton Garden Inn Downtown, Hotel Preston, Club Hotel Nashville, Best Western Opry, Regal Cinemas, and others.

We drove out nearly all of the wage stealing cleaning agencies from downtown and midtown hotels and spread awareness to housekeepers on how to defend their rights, reducing backsliding by hotels and their contracted cleaning agencies.

In June 2018, after housekeepers raised the industry’s floor of wages and conditions and spread the word to workers at 60 of the largest hotels in the city, Workers’ Dignity ended the Just Hospitality Campaign. We continue to support, educate, and train housekeepers through our wage theft program area. For example, after a months-long fight by workers facing wage theft and retaliation, in January 2019, Target Corporation broke its statewide contract with a notoriously horrible cleaning agency, effectively safeguarding hundreds of workers from future wage theft and workplace abuses.

In July 2015, housekeepers crafted a Cleaning Workers Bill of Rights and signed on several hundred of their coworkers to back their demands. Then in 2016, we released the “Hotels Shouldn’t Hurt” report, completed in partnership with Vanderbilt University. The report told us what we already knew -- a majority of housekeepers were going without overtime pay; workplace injuries were frequent, but adequate care was not; people were forced to work when they’re sick; some workers (10%) reported working for less than $7.25/hour or for no wages at all; and more. National and local press responded, and the housekeepers who filled out the survey helped to raise awareness about low wages, unsafe working conditions, and abuse in Nashville’s hotels.

In 2014, 11 housekeepers took to the streets at the downtown Hilton DoubleTree Hotel. Not only did the hotel agree to pay the over $13,000 workers said they were owed, they agreed to change a hotel policy which raised the wages and benefits by an estimated $120,000 per year for about 30 workers.

In 2013: hotel workers sued Rajesh Aggarwal, franchise owner of the Best Western Music Row and the Comfort Inn Downtown, alleging stolen wages, retaliation and threats against workers, physical violence by supervisors, denial of medical care for on-the-job injuries, and minimum wage and overtime violations. Workers reported being forced to work off the clock, earning as little as $3.63 an hour, and working 70 hour workweeks without lunch or rest breaks. Two days later, 75 workers and community members from Workers’ Dignity marched in front of the hotels to urge the owner to stop retaliating against workers and pay full back wages. In June 2013, after four months of multiple protests and prayer vigils, hotel owners agreed to pay seven current and former employees $73,000 over claims of back wages and damages, and housekeepers reported receiving across-the-board wage increases.

BENEATH THE TURNED DOWN SHEETS OF LUXURY HOTELS LURKS AN INDUSTRY RIFE WITH ABUSE, HARASSMENT, AND POVERTY WAGES.

JUST HOSPITALITY

In 2014, 11 housekeepers took to the streets at the downtown Hilton DoubleTree Hotel. Not only did the hotel agree to pay the over $13,000 workers said they were owed, they agreed to change a hotel policy which raised the wages and benefits by an estimated $120,000 per year for about 30 workers.

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