New Ways to Stay
Hotels and the misrepresentation of low wage work
“They [on the left] certainly don’t care that deporting low wage immigrants will raise the wages of the native born, because they don’t mean to create higher living standards for those who are born and raised here. Whether they’re black, white, or any other skin color. They mean to replace those people with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals. They are arsonists, and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match.”
-JD Vance in a 2025 speech given at the Claremont Institute
Hotels–some say they are ‘our rooms away from our room’. Others say they are ‘the Airbnbs of yesteryear’. Whatever you consider them, they are four walls and several stories of human ephemera. Business travelers, vacationers, pay-per-view enjoyers–all rest their weary heads safe with the knowledge they’ll someday soon return to their abodes. Amidst this human impermanence it is the housekeepers who bring comfort and care. Housekeepers, and their hotel colleagues, are the permanent yin to our travelers yang. They awake each day knowing they’re headed to their respective hotel and barring something out of the ordinary, will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A home away from home, but make it work.
Given their visibility and permanence, it’s no wonder hotels would want to highlight these people as part of the guest experience. I saw a commercial for Hilton this week which ended with the commercial’s protagonist and a member of the housekeeping staff having an impromptu run-in. “Hi” she smiles at him as she loads bags onto the luggage cart.
It’s notable that the person portraying the housekeeper appears to be White. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) most recent data shows that 52% of ‘maids and housekeeping cleaners’ are of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. The remaining 48% of housekeepers are a potpourri of other ethnicities. This brings us back to ‘appears to be’ in this paragraph’s first sentence. Ethnicity refers to shared culture, heritage, etc, not so much physical characteristics. So it’s possible the nice lady is ethnically Latino but racially White, but I doubt it.
I doubt it—because in this commercial, as in many others, hotels seem to deliberately avoid Latino representation in housekeeping roles. Casting a white person instead subtly suggests that these workers earn higher—or even livable—wages
This implication is misleading. The BLS reports the average wage of a hotel housekeeper in 2023 to be $31,070. The US Department of Health and Human services sets the poverty guideline for a single person household at $15,650.
Real estate platform Redfin reveals the national median rental price for an apartment is $1,642 per month ($19,704/year). ADP, the enterprise payroll provider and US jobs report provider, informs us the take home pay of someone earning $31,070 in Texas is $2,250/month (For dramatic flair to illustrate how egregiously low the HHS poverty guidelines are, I selected Texas as the example state. This is because a person's take home will be larger due to lack of state income tax.). Assuming a housekeeper pays the median rent, that renter is left with $608 each month before any additional expenses. The perfect amount of money if you’re into pushing a metaphorical rock up a hill only for it to roll down to the bottom again at the end of each month, and maybe take a couple of your fingers with it along the way.
How do we square this with the Trump administration’s push to deport immigrants who are supposedly depressing wages by accepting artificially lower ones, as JD Vance says above? Unless you’re living in a household of 4 or more, housekeeper wages are already above poverty guidelines. Vance’s quote is an admission that the HHS poverty guidelines are bunk. One could argue the numbers are set low in order to limit more people’s access to government assistance. After all, the guidelines are set by HHS each year in conjunction with the Census Bureau, and wouldn’t it make sense that the HHS secretary, RFK Jr., a member of a callous and government-assistance-allergic administration, did this on purpose?
If only the HHS under Kennedy’s predecessor in the Biden administration hadn’t done the exact same thing. The numbers in 2023 under Biden aren’t any more gracious.
Hilton isn’t alone in attempting to misrepresent the wages of its housekeeping employees, it has assistance from the US government. This is a large reason why Hilton’s, and other hotels’, representation of housekeepers is plausible. If a White person is portrayed as a housekeeper, it implies the job pays enough for them to subsist. If a job pays reasonably higher than poverty wages, it implies there’s no issue with the wages.
In his speech, Vance only refers to ‘low wage immigrants’ and not legal low wage immigrants. For immigration hawks, a distinction without a difference. To the VP, the problem of unlivable wages isn’t caused by a lack of government regulation, perverse incentive structures for corporations and their stockholders, or a dearth of worker bargaining power, it’s just…people who accept lower wages, for some reason. Somehow, all these people, housekeepers included, got together and agreed to accept poverty wages. Not only did they coordinate in the absence of any sort of national organizing structure, they spat in the face of the laws of supply and demand and ignored their own self interests by proceeding to accept lower-than-market pay.
Vance’s quote, the US government’s persistent reluctance to raise poverty levels to a more accurate amount, and Hilton’s anodyne commercial all run cover for the issue that the way we pay people doesn’t work. If powerful institutions feel the need to supply a distraction for this, then it must benefit them in some way to do so. Next time you see a miscast housekeeper, ask yourself why.