What I Learned From An Understaffed Hotel

As I mentioned last week, my wife and I recently returned from Louisville, Kentucky, where she attended an embroidery conference and I went sightseeing.  And, as I mentioned, we had a good time.  But one negative aspect of it has stayed with me, as it has a bearing on what is arguably the major issue of our current political debate, especially headed into the midterms.

We stayed in--well,, I won't mention the name, but it was a major hotel designed and built to serve the needs of convention-goers.  The city's convention center is a very short walk away from the hotel, in fact, as are a number of major tourist attractions.  The room was very spacious, clean and comfortable.  But there was one major problem, one that surprised both of us given our experience with conferences and conference hotels.

Everything was understaffed.  On our first full day in Louisville, we had dinner at one of the hotel's restaurants, and ended up waiting over an hour for our meal.  We both noticed that the wait staff seemed badly outnumbered relative to the number of tables in the restaurant.  When our food finally arrived, we complained to our waitress, who told us that there were only two cooks in the kitchen.  Two cooks, and perhaps four or five servers, for a restaurant that had over 60 tables (a rough estimate on my part).  On the plus side, she did give each of us a free dessert, without a lot of negotiation on our part.  This tended to make both of us think that our complaint about the wait for our meals wasn't an unusual one here.  On our way out, we noticed a crowd of about 20 people waiting to be seated, with no host or hostess to seat them but plenty of available tables.  I tried to shout to them that they may want to go elsewhere, but I doubt that any of them heard me.  Needless to say, after that, we took all of our meals outside of the hotel.

Then there was housekeeping.  Or, rather, there wasn't, unless we made a complaint to the front desk to have our room cleaned and made up, and our bathroom supplies replaced.  Again, given our experience with the restaurant, we suspected the problem was not with the diligence of the housekeeping staff, but with the level of staffing that the hotel was maintaining.  And my wife discovered, from talking to some of her fellow conference attendees, that this was indeed a hotel-wide problem.

I realize that, in the broader scheme of life's potential problems, these are relatively petty complaints.  They didn't detract from the fact that the overall experience was a wonderful break from other responsibilities that my wife and I both badly needed.  But I found myself looking at the understaffing of the hotel from a business management standpoint, and I found myself wondering:  why would a major convention hotel, one whose management should be well aware of the staffing levels needed to keep its business running smoothly, allow itself to be so poorly staffed while still marketing itself as a full-service hotel for conference business?

Not deliberately, of course.  But what circumstance beyond its control could put the hotel, and perhaps others, in a circumstance that threatens its short-term effectiveness and its long-term existence?

Well, when you've traveled as much as I have, and you notice how many hotels rely on immigrants to staff their businesses, especially on the food service and housekeeping side, it becomes pretty clear what's really going on here, in the Age of T****.

It's not that there aren't people who are available, willing, and often very experienced to fill these vacant positions, thereby energizing the economies of cities all over the country and creating more jobs for everyone, native-born or otherwise.  It's that we have a "President" who has turned his back and the nation's back on the centrality of immigration to the very essence of the history and greatness of the United States.  All of those potential housekeepers, cooks, servers, and porters are just grist for the deportation mill, and for T****'s manipulation of the immigration issue for personal political gain.  Sadly ironic, given how much of his alleged economic gain has come from the use--and abuse--of immigrant labor.

But what about all of those "economically distressed" T**** voters?  The ones who supposedly have a better work ethic than all of those POC willing to risk their lives for the sake of making their lives better, and keeping America great?  Why aren't they making themselves available to take these jobs, which are clearly there for the taking?  What do they have to say about their seeming unwillingness to cross city and state lines to do so, a far less riskier process than crossing national borders to do so?

In a word:  {crickets}

That's all you really need to know about both immigration and the state of the economy, currently pumped up by debt but shortchanged by the subtraction of labor from people who will take any job, and any risk associated with that job.  That's how much we as a people, at the moment, are willing to throw away the American Dream for the sake of perpetuating the continuance of the American Nightmare:  racism, the original sin of America's founding and the thread that runs through every major crisis in our nation's existence.

Does it really make any sense?  Is it even what a decent people would expect of themselves?  Have we struggled and sacrificed as a nation for nearly three centuries to die a death inflicted by caving in to our worst impulses?

T**** has no interest in anything except exploiting our worst impulses for short-term political gain.  Immigration, on the other hand, has been an enduring part of our nation's growth, and a part that we have neglected fixing for decades.  If I have to chose between T****, and the people who really want to exemplify the American work ethic, the people who should be filling the jobs at the convention hotels across the country--well, I've made my choice.

And I'm making it again on November 6.

I hope and pray you will join me.