If you’ve stayed at the Heritage Hills Resort in York County while touring Amish country, toasted newlyweds at the Avalon Hotel in Erie or settled in for a weekend of pampering at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in the Laurel Highlands, chances are the person who made your bed, poured your Champagne or washed your towels wasn’t being paid minimum wage.
In fact, Pennsylvania ranks fourth in the nation — behind Texas, Alabama and Florida — for the number of hotels breaking labor laws, according to an analysis by PublicSource, a nonprofit news organization.
York, Erie and Pittsburgh had the highest number of violations by their hotels, with Farmington, Lancaster and the Harrisburg area coming in behind them.
These working men and women, who might have few skills to find another job, are often reluctant to talk about their situations, as PublicSource discovered after making many attempts to reach them.
“These workers are subject to retaliation from employers, and some hotels have nondisclosure agreements,” said Mackenzie Smith, an organizer and executive board member of Unite Here Local 57, which represents hotel workers in Pittsburgh.
Besides Heritage Hills, two other midstate hotels — the Park Inn by Radisson in Hampden Twp. and the Hilton Harrisburg — were among the 10 hotels with the most labor law violations in Pennsylvania from 2008 to May 2013. The Park Inn had 56 violations, and the Hilton had 53, according to the analysis.
The Hilton Harrisburg was one of two Harrisburg-area hotels that ranked among the top 10 in the state in terms of labor law violations recorded between May 2008 and May 2013. A hotel official said the problems were the result of a misinterpretation of how to handle tipped shuttle drivers' wages, and has since been rectified. (File photo)
"The violations listed were caused by a common misinterpretation of how to handle tipped shuttle driver wages," Joe Massaro, general manager of the Hilton Harrisburg, told PennLive. "Once discovered, we immediately paid those 27 employees involved over this two-year period and corrected our method for the future. The total paid was minimal, equalling approximately 0.06 percent of the total payroll for the period evaluated.
The Park Inn did not answer PennLive's requests for comment.
George Ference, regional administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in the Northeast, said the industry “accounts for a disproportionate share of vulnerable workers, many of whom are subject to unfair treatment and disparate wages.”
A PublicSource analysis of data from the Labor Department from May 2008 to May 2013 shows that Pennsylvania hotels have routinely violated federal laws meant to protect their employees.
In York Twp., York County, Heritage Hills Golf Resort operates a luxury hotel, spa and golf resort. According to the DOL’s report on Heritage, the resort is a “repeat violator” of labor laws, with previous violations found in 2003 and 2007. Heritage Hills also is one of eight hotel owners in the state that has been assessed federal fines for violating child labor laws.
Two years ago, the parent company of Heritage Hills agreed to pay $55,353 in back wages to more than 200 workers after a three-year federal investigation found violations related to minimum wage, overtime, record-keeping and child labor laws. It also paid $5,000 in penalties.
Since then, the company has cut back on the number of people younger than 18 that it puts on its payroll, said Brandy Meyer, a spokeswoman for Heritage Hills.
Hiring fewer minors “is not great for the community because high school students can be exemplary employees,” she said.
These numbers helped make York the city with the highest number of labor violations in the state.
Erie came in second, thanks mostly to the Avalon Hotel and Conference Center. The Labor Department uncovered 138 violations committed during a two-week period in April 2009. Avalon agreed to pay 69 workers more than $25,000 in back wages in 2009, but did not pay them by the DOL’s deadline. Only after several days of phone calls from the DOL did the workers finally receive their back wages, according to the department’s report.
“I didn’t own the hotel then,” said Ramesh Diora, the current owner. “And we don’t have any problems now. When people work, we pay them.”
Diora’s company, Errie Operating, bought Avalon after the previous owner, Mantiff Erie, declared bankruptcy in 2010.
Squeezing every penny
Hotels find many ways to cut corners when it comes to paying their workers. Among Pennsylvania hotels, the most common violations were failing to pay employees the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and disregarding the law to pay them one-and-a-half times their regular hourly wages for working more than 40 hours per week.
Heritage Hills and the Fairmont Pittsburgh, the city’s newest hotel, got in trouble with the DOL for several types of violations, including requiring low-wage employees to pay for name tags and other job necessities.
Heritage Hills deducted wages for meal breaks workers didn’t take. Meanwhile, meal servers went unpaid for work done when they began working before their scheduled start time, as the hotel expected them to.
“Some hotel owners are looking to make every dime out of the property,” said John Graf, president of the western Pennsylvania chapter of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association. “They want to put as little money into the property as possible.”
Nearly tied with Pittsburgh is Farmington, whose 112 violations all come from the popular Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, which opened in 1987. In 2010, the self-described “lavish Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star resort” agreed to pay nearly $10,000 in back wages.
The resort had failed to pay food servers overtime based on their full hourly wage.
“We had changed over to a new system, and we plugged in the wrong calculation,” said Chris Plummer, Nemacolin’s general manager. “We calculated overtime based on the wrong hourly wages. But we put what we owed into our associates’ next paychecks, and they were really happy about it.”
In addition to wage issues, hotel violations have also taken the form of hotel owners classifying housekeepers, custodians, cooks, desk clerks and others as independent contractors instead of employees. This allows hotels to avoid paying for family and medical leave, unemployment insurance and other costs.
“A plumber or a painter is an independent contractor,” said John DuMont, director of the Wage and Hour Division’s District Office in Pittsburgh. “They determine what you will pay them and how long they’ll work. And the nature of the working relationship is not ongoing.
“But a housekeeper can’t decide her hours or how much she’s getting paid,” DuMont added. “If the employer controls your hours and pay, you’re not an independent contractor. You’re an employee.”
The DOL determines the city in which violations have occurred based on the business address the employer provides. The PublicSource analysis used the addresses as reported in the federal database, so some hotels are slightly outside of city boundaries.
Paid in cash
Pittsburgh is the city with the state’s third-highest number of violations. Its 113 labor violations are distributed among just 18 Pittsburgh-area hotels. But while most of those hotels had violations in the single digits, the Four Points Sheraton at the Pittsburgh Airport had 16. Among its illegalities was paying housekeepers per room cleaned instead of by the hour, and falsely recording the per-room rate as an hourly rate.
There were 18 violations at the Days Inn on Banksville Road, where one worker told the DOL that the hotel avoided paying overtime rates by paying in cash at the straight time rate for overtime work.
Neither hotel returned repeated phone calls or emails seeking comment.
The highest number of hotel labor violations in Pittsburgh came from the Fairmont Pittsburgh. Last year, the DOL reported 33 violations involving 30 employees of the downtown hotel. The violations occurred as far back as 2010, the year the Fairmont opened. The Fairmont paid more than $3,000 in back wages to employees.
“The violations you refer to were brought to our attention a year and a half ago, in January 2012,” said Julie Abramovic, a spokeswoman for the Fairmont Pittsburgh. “The additional wages were immediately repaid, and we have updated internal procedures to comply with wage and hour laws. Since then we have been in total compliance.”
The Labor Department has begun to push for changes in Pennsylvania hotel violations. In 2011, the department launched an initiative aimed at protecting the state’s hotel workers by doing more random checks for labor-law violations.
Source: Pennlive.com
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