The workers that look after you during your stay do a tough but important job, for little money in trying conditions. Stamford makes huge profits by offering a five star service – but they do not pay their workers a fair wage to provide that level of quality. Stamford has not yet committed to ensuring that their workers have decent wages, secure jobs and better working conditions.

Stamford staff work hard so you can have a great nights rest – you can help them get a fair deal. Sign up to be an Ethical Traveller to show your support today!

Jeremy Kerbel
LHMU Climate Justice Campaigner

We’ve entered into the first stage of our campaign. Starting at a union conference in Sydney last week, we’re getting out and building our supporter list so that the Luxury Hotel chains have to listen. We’ve also created a facebook page to help spread the word about luxury hotels. We’re not going to stop until every luxury hotel chain in Australia earns the first star.

Help bring change to the luxury hotel industry – Sign up to be an ethical traveller, and tell your friends about us!

We’re pretty sceptical of greenwash from the hotels – we think they tend to favour sustainability initiatives that save money or let them trumpet “being green” in their marketing.

By far the most common “green wash” initiative is asking guests to reuse their towel.

Don’t get us wrong, water and energy use and laundry waste are important impacts that hotels should be managing. As part of a comprehensive program we would welcome this initiative.

Its just we hear regularly from hotel workers that hotel management often don’t pay much attention to these things in the back of house.

We recently heard of a great initiative from New Zealand that gives hotels a way to show they’re sincere about their environmental efforts. Guests are offered the choice to not have their room serviced – they simply put a sign on their door handle.

Sounds familiar so far. But instead of using this to save money like most hotels do (by cutting back hours for housekeepers) for every room not cleaned the hotel allows their workers to donate their time to a local volunteer environmental initiative.

They reduce their impact, make a real contribution to their local environment (which they rely on to attract tourists) and Guests can recognise this hotel as one that is serious about being sustainable.

What do you think? Should hotels use the money they save from initiatives like towel recycling to invest in their local community?

Or should they invest it in other energy saving initiatives that cost money in the short-term?

How can we make sure these savings don’t come at the cost of workers?

It was the 1980’s when US environmentalist Jay Westerveld criticised hotels for advertising their towel recycling programs but shunning recycling elsewhere in their business.

The term is now used to refer to any cynical attempt by a business to cash in on environmentally conscious consumers by implementing measures that in fact save the business money.

There’s a great account of greenwash here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash

Hotels are still amongst the worst. Every hotel asks guests to hang their towel up, few allow guests to recycle. Almost none outside of the exclusive eco category audit their recycling programs.

Despite decades of attention these big businesses still refuse to properly address their environmental impact. Ironic really given they have the most to lose from climate change (what with the risk to Australia’s natural tourist attractions).

Our attempts to raise these issues with them have fallen on deaf ears, so far. Their Association has failed to consider environmental sustainability and attacked The First Star for seeking to draw attention to their record.

By joining The First Star you’ve said you want to stay in hotels that care about their workers and their environment. Now that we’re building a community of ethical travellers we need your ideas about how we can get these hotels to change.

Many of these cahins are also responsible for terrible environmental practices elsewhere in the world. We’re working with our partners to be able to bring you more details of this sort of behaviour: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/environmental-travel-the-greenwash-410815.html

If you want to know more about the Hotels’ Greenwash, visit our site, join the discussion.

Regular travellers report the frustration of swipe cards that don’t work. Trekking back down to reception where the card is quickly reprogrammed with guest sent back on their way.

However, The First Star has been told the replacement of room keys with electronic swipe cards holds a hidden environmental toll. Every single swipe card lock contains 3 or 4 AA batteries. In a large hotels that’s thousands of inefficient and hard to dispose of batteries clogging up our landfill.

We’re told recharging is impractical, and recycling too expensive. We think its just another example of hotels ignoring the environmental impact of their business decisions.

Was it really that hard for us to turn a key? Most of us still use keys in our own home. Is the convenience of swipe cards worth the cost?

Check out the resolution below:

National Conference notes that the tourism industry and its employees face challenges from the combined effects of the Global Recession and dangerous climate change.

Employees in the tourism industry already experience low wages and poor career paths, and are now being asked by many employers in the industry to carry the costs of downturns in tourism through lower wages and “WorkChoices” agreements.

This National Conference believes workers in these jobs need the protections provided by Labor’s Forward with Fairness policy. Labor’s new laws offer hope for these workers to bargain for higher productivity and better jobs.

Additionally, the tourism industry and accommodation hotels in particular have significant exposure to risks associated with climate change, including:

• reliance on international travel which will increase in cost as fossil fuels become scarcer;
• reliance on natural assets which may be threatened by climate change, including The Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu; and
• exposure in coastal and low-lying areas to erosion, rising sea levels and increases in dramatic weather events.

National Conference also notes that while some in the tourism industry have adopted “towel recycling” programs and self-accredited themselves as “green”, there is not currently widespread adoption of practices to reduce the environmental impact of their activities.

This National Conference calls on the tourism industry to adopt more ethical approaches to its environmental and labour standards. Labor believes the Australian community expects corporate citizens to treat their workers fairly and to do everything reasonably possible to minimise their impact on the environment.

Labor supports efforts to inform consumers about the labour and environment standards of accommodation hotels, including through the “First Star” initiative which encourages businesses to better reflect community expectations in relation to fair employment and action on climate change.

The BBC sent in two undercover reporters to find out what it was really like to work in a high end hotel in London.

They uncovered issues which would sound very familiar to hotel workers in Australia; contract housekeeping, underpayments based on rooms not hours and lack of cleanliness.

Click here to see the report at BBC News.

I was in a meeting with Hilton management today and it felt like we were talking a different language.

We’re supposed to be negotiating a new agreement, one that should deliver a productivity increase for the hotel and a pay rise for workers. This is the brave new world of industrial relations, Rudd style, where we all sit in a room and find solutions to industries’ problems.

So I have suggested the workers get together and talk about what should change to make the Hilton a better hotel and a better place to work. I’ve suggested it should be the union’s role to facilitate that. In fact we’ve proposed an extensive and proactive process to achieve an outcome both workers and management can be happy with.

Their adviser, from the same employer union that lobbied for a $0 increase for workers, keeps asking me to point to where in the law it says they have to do that.

They proudly announced their agreements in other states had passed the “no disadvantage test”. That’s right, it’s a big deal when their agreement is deemed not to leave employees worse off. There was no consideration that employees should be left better off.

That’s the same agreement almost two thirds of workers at this site voted against. Why? They didn’t think 1 per cent, roughly 15 cents an hour, was much of a pay rise. They thought averaging weekly hours into a 152 hour month would leave them worse off. Workers at this hotel want to see real change, not penny pinching.

I’ve been saying I believe that agreement “dodgy”. I’ve said that about similar agreements at hotels all over Australia. But at Hilton it really seems to get up their nose.

A Hilton rep in the room challenged my assertion- “how can you call them dodgy,” he protested. “It’s legal isn’t it. Admit it, its legal!”

And that’s when I realised what’s wrong with this industry: they think the law tells them what they should do, when really it just tells them what they have to do. Like all laws, the Fair Work Act regulates the bare minimum. Responsible employers, dare I say ethical ones, set a standard much higher than the law.

Just like ethical citizens set their standards above the law. The law doesn’t regulate manners, or respect, but we adhere to those behaviours because that’s a test of who we are. There’s a whole range of societal norms that encourage behaviour better than the law stipulates, including the judgment of our peers if we fail to live up to their expectations.

The hospitality industry is a bit like the wild-west. So long as it’s legal, in the strictest sense, you can do what you like. Nobody will judge you, so long as it’s legal. They wont judge you because they let the law set their behaviour too.

The look of confusion that comes across the face of these mid-range bosses whenever I suggest they do something the letter of the law might not require them to do (no matter how reasonable it would seem to a casual observer) speaks volumes about the industry.

When I describe the award as the minimum the QHA representative gets offended. “It’s the standard.” When I say its only the standard in this industry, she asks me why we need an award at all. 2009 and not only do we have employers advocating abolition of such a fundamental pillar of our regulation of work, they can also not see that a 5 star hotel should aim to be productive enough to pay their workers more than the bare minimum.

It’s ironic that whenever we meet with senior managers (above hotel level) they bemoan the industries’ reputation as a bad employer and they ask why the union won’t help them build public and political support. Of course they also claim they are the one operator that values their people.

And hence the problem. They don’t see any commercial value in doing anything more than they are required to by law. And while that’s the case the community will continue to see hospitality jobs for exactly what they are, minimum wage jobs.

For all their special programs (I’ve never worked in an industry with more fancy names for their otherwise unappreciated workers) they just can’t see a way to use bargaining to deliver real pay rises. Since 1993 employers and workers in just about every other sector of the economy have done just that. But in hospitality there is no ambition to get above the minimum at all.

All they aspire to is the legal minimum, which is a shame for their workers but ultimately the real shame is for them and their investors. For until they work together, improve skills and training, safety and wages community and political support will never come.

No amount of screaming about the sky falling in will cause the government to spend taxpayers’ money saving an industry that the community doesn’t support.

Of course the same attitude applies when it comes to the environment. For an industry with a lot to lose if we don’t address climate change, hotels have done little to address their own environmental impact. Why? Because they don’t have to.

It clear the only way to get these hotels to do anything more than the law requires is for us consumers to start demanding it. If together we can build a movement of ethical travellers willing to make their booking decision, maybe even pay a little more, to stay in a hotel that we know treats their workers and our environment well, we can change the industry.

That’s why we built The First Star, thanks for joining in.

It seems pretty obvious to me. Honesty is a fundamental tenet of personal ethics.

Whenever I’ve talked about The First Star with hotel managers I’ve offered, even encouraged them to get online and comment. If they disagree with someone I, or you or a worker has said, jump on and give their side of the story.

I was pretty shocked though when it became clear management at some hotels were posting comments not on behalf of the hotel, but instead pretending to be workers or customers. Someone from the same IP address has been pretending to be workers at a range of hotels – indicating that it is likely to be someone pretending rather than one computer being used by a range of people at one hotel.

Sites like this thrive on lively debate. But we expect contributors to be honest about who they are. On a site dedicated to encouraging ethical behaviour, I guess we know hotels willing to deceive our readers aren’t going to make the grade.

I was also surprised these managers weren’t aware that web servers track the originating IP address of visitors. I guess I’ve tipped them off now, they’ll probably be racing to the nearest internet café to launch their next tirade, which probably starts:

“I’m a housekeeper at this hotel and I love it. I used to get bored only cleaning 14 rooms per shift, so I was so glad when they increased it to 19. Management here are so lovely, they really take care of me – sometimes I worry so much about the hotels profitability I give some of my pay back. $14.85 an hour really is too much for the kind of work I do.”

We reserve the right to “out” these folk, either here on the site or at the next big industry conference. But in the meantime we trust you’ll be able to tell the difference between genuine and useful contributions and those posted by these few managers. They stand out once you know to look for them.