Housekeepers represented by the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 held about a dozen meetings with hotel management, packing hotel meeting rooms and union headquarters to share their experiences using the app, union officials recalled.
“We were able to show the company that you’ve got guest room attendants crisscrossing all over the hotel and you’re losing efficiency,” said Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer.
Pappageorge declined to name the hotels the union negotiated with, but newsletters posted on the union’s website refer to a multiyear fight with MGM Resorts over its use of HotSOS.
The union reached agreements with major Strip employers in late 2022. The employers agreed to a software feature that mostly keeps workers near their stations, eliminating treks across hotels, union officials said. Housekeepers now have the freedom to sequence their cleaning of assigned rooms and rely on their own judgment: If they see a vacant room that’s not on their digital list, [Elsa] Roldan said, they can clean it.
“Nobody else but us knows how to manage and handle our time,” Roldan said.
The Culinary Union has since reached agreements over HotSOS with the city’s casino resorts where it has members, which includes most resorts on the Las Vegas Strip and in downtown Las Vegas.
Since then, hotel worker unions in other cities have “used the Vegas language as a template to start the bargaining,” said Ben Begleiter, a research director for UNITE HERE, the national hotel workers union.