A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, women working in all sectors of the travel and hospitality industry face an uncertain future, thanks to widespread furloughs and layoffs throughout aviation positions, across hotel brands, and in countless other businesses that rely on tourism. And with fewer jobs predicted to return as vaccines roll out and the virus slows, millions of women face losing their financial footing for good.
There’s no doubt the economic downturn caused by the virus has hit women hard across all industries in the U.S.: In December, all 140,000 of the jobs lost in the U.S. were those held by women, with the vast majority being women of color, according to a report on net unemployment from the National Women’s Law Center. In fact, 154,000 Black women left the labor force completely. At the end of 2020, there were 2.1 million fewer women in the labor force compared to February 2020 the report says.
In 2021, the situation is especially dire across the leisure and hospitality sector, where women—and many women of color—hold more than 53 percent of the jobs. “In January 2020 there were 8,979,000 women employees in leisure and hospitality, down to 6,939,000 in January 2021,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. “In other words, 53.4 percent of job losses in this industry were experienced by women.” Since February 2020, employment in leisure and hospitality is down by nearly 4 million jobs, a drop of almost 23 percent.
As President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus bill is being debated in the Senate, it's these women who need some of the most urgent relief.
“This is hitting a lot of women [in the travel industry],” says Sarah Jane Glynn, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “And these aren’t jobs that paid amazing wages beforehand.”
A complex web of issues are forcing women out of the workplace, both in hospitality and otherwise. Chief among them are unprecedented caregiving issues caused by the pandemic. “If kids are home from school, that usually becomes mom’s responsibility,” Glynn says. “In some cases you’ve got more and more women who are either leaving the labor force entirely or having to scale back their hours, because they just don’t have enough time in the day to do everything that is expected of them.”
Layer on top the travel restrictions and health concerns continuing to suppress demand across the industry, and women hospitality workers are left in a tenuous position. “Maybe you had enough money coming in through unemployment to keep you afloat if you were lucky,” says Glynn. “But are you going to be able to find another job? If this is the sector you work in, if this is the sector you’re likely to go back to, if that’s where your skills and training are, are there jobs for you to return to?”
Facing these unexpected job eliminations has disproportionately impacted older hospitality workers. “If I don’t have my job back, it would be really difficult for me,” says Nathalie Prudhomme, 69, a uniform attendant at a large Miami hotel who was laid off when the property closed in March 2020. She was hoping to return when business came back, but the hotel is now proposing to eliminate Prudhomme’s department. “I don’t want to go somewhere else and apply for a job. I’m used to [this hotel] for 20 years.”
Finding a new job—if she is able to—wouldn’t spell the end of financial woes: Displaced older workers typically see a 35 percent decline in wages, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School.
It’s that sort of decline that leads to a worker's financial security getting knocked off course, and not just in the near-term. “When they reach retirement age, they probably only have their social security benefit to live off of,” Glynn says. “And now all of those are lower because you’ve had this extended spell of unemployment due to the pandemic. It makes me so scared for what we’re going to see.”
Before COVID-19, retirement was imminent for Sonja Flowers, a 62-year-old server who has worked at Disney’s Grand Floridian for 27 years. But after being laid off in March 2020, she now has to delay it. Thanks to her local chapter of the Unite Here union, which represents a vast array of hospitality and travel industry workers across the country, she has secured the right to return to the role once the restaurant reopens. But while Flowers acknowledges her luck, job security with no prospect of retirement only takes away half of her worries. “I mean, $100 difference in your social security is a lot when you’re on a budget and that’s your income,” says Flowers. “I’m probably going to have work until I’m 70 years old to be able to live comfortably—not in luxury but in comfort. Working another eight years was not in my plan.”
Others are left guessing if their jobs will ever come back. “In our hotel it’s like a rollercoaster,” says Nely Reinante, a housekeeper at a hotel in Hawaii. “Only the highest seniority has the chance of going back to work.” Instead of hiring back more workers as business returns, the hotel is hiring back fewer—and asking them to work overtime. “We can’t understand why they’re offering overtime to the highest seniority working since there’s hundreds of us who are still unemployed,” says Reinante.
A major concern for housekeepers is the looming possibility that hotels’ COVID-19 policies, which eliminate daily room cleanings to limit potential virus exposures, could become permanent or transform into a model in which guests “opt in” to certain housekeeping services.
If so, hotels could operate with fewer housekeepers, which would be “a devastating effect on the economic security and economic viability on large swathes of workers who are predominantly women and people of color,” says D. Taylor, president of the Unite Here union. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 88 percent of hotel housekeepers are women, and more than 67 percent are people of color.
“It’s like they’re showing no care for us, the workers,” Reinante says. “We are working so hard in the hotel to provide exceptional service to every guest, so they will feel the warm aloha spirit and feel that they are well taken care of. We, the housekeepers, are the heart of each hotel.”
But it’s not just the hotel sector looking to cut costs when it comes to staff. While Shandolyn Lewis is currently employed as a contract worker with a Unite Here-affiliated airline catering company at Detroit airport, the airline recently switched its contract to a new non-union catering provider—and “they’re not hiring all the existing workers,” Lewis says.
In fact, according to Lewis, the new catering company has had two job fairs to seek out new staff members. “In 15 days, the contract ends and people don’t know if they have a job or not.”
Subcontracting and undercutting wages happen often following a recession, says Taylor. “In many cases in the hospitality industry, they don’t want to give people the right to return to their jobs,” he says. “They want to terminate them and hire in new people, or hire in the same people at a considerably lower rate of pay.”
That type of maneuvering isn’t limited to one sector or one company, but it affects the industry’s labor market as a whole. Even as the virus abates and business returns, hospitality workers will in all likelihood be earning significantly less. “If you’re talking about a labor market where there’s way more applicants for every job than there are open positions, that shifts the power balance in favor of the employer, which means wages go down, because they can afford to pay less,” says Glynn. “So you’re probably going to make less money when you find work in the end.”
For those who have managed to keep their jobs, there is still the stress of childcare. Yaneth Chavez, a food service worker who was laid off from Red Rocks Casino in Las Vegas, where she worked for 19 years, was able to find an on-call job at the nearby Raiders Stadium. But looking after her two kids, who are 10 and 8 years old, makes it tough to show up to the sporadic shifts.
“Doing school at home is really hard because we have to be parents and teachers, but also if they need me at work I have to go, and I have to find a babysitter,” says Chavez. She is sometimes able to drop off the kids with family in the area when a shift comes up, but that isn’t ideal. “Because of the virus, the last thing you want to do is take out your kids from home. But if I have to, I have to.”
Lewis, who is her family’s primary breadwinner, has a high school-aged daughter who is about to head back to in-person classes. But with the pre-pandemic transportation options she relied on no longer available, she is struggling to arrange transportation to the school. “I work 5:30 [a.m.] to 7:30 [p.m.] some days—getting her back and forth to school is a problem,” she says.
There’s hope that President Biden’s stimulus bill could solve some parts of the ongoing childcare crisis. The relief package that recently passed the House of Representatives includes extending tax credits for certain employers who voluntarily offer paid leave to workers through October 1 and gives $39 billion to child care providers.
The bill also enhances healthcare benefits, including more generous federal premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans. For some low-income enrollees and those collecting unemployment benefits in 2021, the subsidies would be high enough to eliminate their premiums completely. Additional help for unemployed workers to keep employer health insurance through COBRA is also part of the package.
This is crucial for workers like Reinante, who relies on the medical benefits from her job, the costs of which are completely covered by her union contract at the hotel in Hawaii. If she isn’t called back to work this year, her family would lose those benefits. “We cannot go to sleep because we are thinking of the future,” she says.
Another vital component of the relief bill is the extension of the enhanced federal unemployment payments. The benefit, which many say kept them afloat through the shut downs, is set to expire on March 14. Lewis, who works a second job in addition to her airline catering contract, says those payments made all the difference. “The unemployment was just what I was bringing home with two jobs,” she says. “There wasn’t any extra, or any windfall. I just had enough to pay my bills and that’s it.”
The current bill would boost the weekly payments from $300 to $400 and extend them through August 29.
Still, women in the travel industry are doing what they can to be resourceful. A recent report from Airbnb, for instance, says that women who became first-time hosts during the pandemic have collectively earned more than half a billion dollars and counting.
Elsewhere, women are providing for their communities. Flowers and four of her coworkers started a food bank in May 2020 to help out fellow employees on furlough from Disney World. “When it started we were doing 200 [people per day],” Flowers says. “Then it got to 400, [then] 600, then we actually got up to 1100 people. I’m going to guess we did 700 to 800 people last Saturday. We started out [serving] the hotel restaurant workers and Disney employees, but we don’t check IDs anymore. It’s just whoever needs food.”
Workers going out of their way to support one another may help make ends meet in the short term. But in the long term, experts say that women hospitality workers might never regain their pre-pandemic earning power.
“Even at the end of your work life, which may be 20, 30, 40 years from now, you’re going to feel the effects of this,” Glynn says. “Things are never going to go back to normal for those people, unless they’re really, really lucky.”
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