https://www.patreon.com/houdinicollective/posts/slumlord-disease-173662280I just got the phone call from building management. It is pretty simple: when there is an issue that costs money, the money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere might just be your check. Today it is my check. Irate customers can be difficult, as anyone who has worked customer service knows. They are probably upset about something unrelated and probably taking it out on you. It is what it is, and it is the job. Last week I had an upset customer, and this week I have a problem with my paycheck.
There is a $100 security deposit to stay at the hotel where I work. A lot of the time there is poor communication about this. It is a fine-print issue, something people do not know about until they arrive and see the big sign on the desk. This customer was upset about the deposit and did not have the money for it. I offered the under-the-counter alternative. We do not advertise it, and we are told to use good judgment if we do it, but we are allowed to hold an ID at the front desk in lieu of the deposit. The caveat? If the room is damaged, we have to pay for the damages. But this was an old man, and I wanted to de-escalate the situation, as he was already shouting at me. The hold-your-ID offer only seemed to make him even more upset. He said he would take his business elsewhere and demanded a receipt. I printed it for him, and he asked about a refund. I told him, โYou are not staying here, so I do not see why you would not be refunded.โ A simple sentence that cost me over $100.
Booking.com corporate support called later that night and requested that I cancel the reservation. I did. I also canceled part of my paycheck when I did. What I did not know is that, unlike no-show reservations, which I can cancel, I am not supposed to cancel those types of reservations. There is a cancellation fee, a contractual obligation for the customer to pay part of the stay. In this case, the weeklong stay had a single-day cancellation fee. I am paying that fee because, again, โthe money has to come from somewhere.โ
Just like Israel has the right to exist, a business has a right to profit. Business expenses? Risk? Overhead? No, a right to profit. Let us save the debates on whether I should have deferred to management or whether I should have known better. Perhaps I do deserve the write-up. But when someone steals from Walmart, even if it is your aisle, even if you are the one stocking it, even if you are in the middle of facing the very shelf they stole from, pulling product to the front so it looks nice for the customer, they do not deduct the cost of the goods from your pay. Why would they? The people who run Walmart are bastards, but they are not stupid. It is incredibly illegal to do that, and it does not make for good business. Good business owners know you will have shrink, emergency costs, unexpected expenses, refunds, and other customer issues. It is part of doing business. But in the great country that is America, businesses have a right to profit.
It is easier to fudge the numbers when you are a small business. It is easier to manage your employees when you have only a couple dozen. It feels good to punish them anyway. They will learn from a mistake if it costs them. To be powerful is to have a right to profit. So management calls me up, and I explain myself just the way I explained myself here. Then the boss man, who is also my landlord, calls me up. Frustrated. He tells me directly, โThe money has to come from somewhere.โ
I work the Night Audit shift. Two nights in a row last week, revenue was over $10,000 that day. Not uncommon. Average daily revenue is somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000 at this location, not counting the second location, the motel where I live and also work. Regardless, the money taken from my check is small potatoes compared to the revenue of these two properties. If the business would be broken by a $100 loss in revenue from a cancellation fee, Bossman has bigger problems than my mistake. But when your paycheck is less than $700 every two weeks, that deduction, that punishment, hurts a whole lot more. It is basic math, basic ratios.
โIt is just business.โ But is it? Is it really just business if this is an illegal business practice that makes little to no sense for a serious business owner to engage in? The wage theft was coupled with threats of firing. Just piss-poor management all around. What should have happened? I am speaking as someone who was team lead for over a dozen help desk technicians. Step one: What is the problem? What happened, and what caused the issue? This was the customer who was irate about the deposit. A simple discussion would reveal that every shift at least one person, sometimes more, complains about not knowing the deposit policy. The policy is not a hotel standard, so that makes sense. The issue could have been avoided entirely by communicating this with guests better, perhaps by sending a pre-arrival reminder text. Step two: What about the issue can be prevented? In this case, it would be educating the employee about refund policies, what reservations can or cannot be canceled, and when to defer Booking.com corporate support to management during the day. One cannot know what has not been taught. Neither of these requires even a write-up, and both would result in better business overall. But none of these solutions could ever be fielded. Could you imagine if I suggested them? I would be fired on the spot. The authoritarian nature of the small business owner literally stifles progress, even when that progress would benefit the business. That is the nonsense of capitalism.
Capitalism. The pursuit of profit. The feeling that you have a right, not just a desire, not just the feeling of needing some bread, but a right to take and take and take. The profit motive. What is profit? Profit is what is left when the workers have been paid. Does the businessman clean the laundry? Fold the sheets? Get yelled at by customers? Check them in? No, but he owns the business, so he sets the wages, and the wages determine the profit. The lower the wages, the higher the profit, because profit is literally surplus labor value. Think about your typical day. The boss does not even come in. Let us say 24 employees work during that 24-hour period. Let us say it was that $11,000 day. That day, each employee made the business about $500. Yet every two weeks their paychecks are about $700. All the missing money, after business expenses, is pure profit. That is the bossโs Mercedes, Lexus, and Tesla. That is his employees walking to work. That is the lack of Narcan at the motel, because Narcan costs money and that money should be profit. We have already discussed that.
The pursuit of profit, the right to profit, the right to the sweat from another manโs brow, seems to be the spirit of this country. It is the spirit of the slumlord. It is the spirit that has to take over oneโs body when they issue the โDo Not Rentโ notice to a family already down on their luck. There has been a family staying at the hotel where I work. The husband works at the 7-Eleven across the street. They have one kid, and the wife is disabled. They are working to get out of the rut, just like anyone else. He picks up any shift he can. Our DSA chapter brought them groceries, which I left in our back office and let the group chat know we did that. He does not always have money for a room. Sometimes they stay at the cheaper roach motels between the days he works. That is the other type of motel Bossman runs, and I do not blame him for wanting to keep his family out of them as much as possible. He is the guy I wrote the โIโll Let You Sleep by the Hotel Poolโ article about, catching a few hours of sleep between shifts, homeless and trying to feed a family. Bossman kicked them to the curb today. Do Not Rent. He had been staying with us for a couple of months because of his work location: a stable paying customer and a decent dude in a bad spot, doing the best he can in an economy that only benefits the suits at the top. So why did he kick them out? Because his son is autistic and wets the bed. Because he wets the bed, the hotel has to do more laundry and, in one instance, replace the sheets. He paid for them, but the burden was too much on the business. It is just business.
If you live in a hotel, a motel, an inn, or whatever else, you are homeless. Yes, it is not the same as someone who is purely on the street, but it is still homelessness. You are still transient, still without a home, still only barely with shelter. If you live in a place like this, you have no protections, no legal rights, no security that comes with a home. When someone gets evicted, it is a court process. There are legal rights. They cannot change the locks. They have to give notice within a certain time. These are all things the working class fought tooth and nail for. There was no process. No mandated time. No legal rights. Tomorrow at 11 a.m., you and your family, you and your autistic 3-year-old son, must leave the property, or you will be met by police. Those police are legally allowed to kill you, and perhaps your child too, as we have just seen in Mississippi. It will be justified, because ultimately your humanity is nothing compared to the right to profit. It was a notice just like that which forced me to rehome my dog. Imagine paying for a week, just a week at a time of stability, if you can call it that. You barely make enough to cover rent. You pay, and then the next day you are given 48 hours to leave, or the same deal: police, the protectors of the property relation, will have you removed. The 48 hours was a blessing, the small business ownerโs kindness, because that family was given less than 12 hours to make arrangements. Perhaps it was because I work for him, or perhaps it was because I paid for a week just the day before. But with no money in my bank, nowhere to go, and a need to keep my job, what else could I do? I was lucky enough to have a DSA comrade who could foster my dog, but does that family have the luck I do? What luck would the woman who overdosed have had if I was not on shift that night? If our DSA chapter did not provide the Narcan for the front desk? When I called him that night, her unconscious body still in his lobby, he spoke three words and hung up: โPolice handle it.โ The same way they would handle that family if they did not leave. Another body in the way of profit.
It is a spiritual disease. We are a sick, sick people. So many of us have grown tired of this society of misery for the masses and profit for the owners. We have grown tired of our powerlessness, of the hierarchies that rule over us. No one could have prevented that family from being evicted. What could any of us do? What could we say? What solidarity could we really show? The boss man is the king, and the kingโs word is law. The peasants toil for the kingโs riches. That is just the way things are. It is just business, after all. It is just business when you let someone overdose on your property, with no Narcan and no employee training, and just let them die. Just business when you force a family already facing hard times into even harder ones. Just business when you take your employeesโ wages to make up for your business risks. No society should allow its children to sleep on the streets. No civilization should have its people working without a home. Forty-seven percent of people who are homeless work. They work to take care of their families, to survive for themselves, just like that man. He walks to work; Bossman drives the Lexus, Tesla, and Mercedes. Our wages are stolen while his children go on lavish trips and sell us courses on โthe hustle.โ Why is there no number that man can call? He works. He pays taxes. He does his part, and for what? Meager scraps? Stolen food from the gas station hot box? The reason there is no number for him to call to get housing, no simple program that says, โYou have a family, you need a home, we can work with your wages,โ is that desperate people in bad situations are easier to exploit. Being easier to exploit makes it easier to extract surplus labor value from you. It makes it easier for Bossman to profit.
It is the same with me. I am hoping he sends me the exact amount he is going to take out of my check over text messages. I asked for this over the phone when he told me it was happening. I know this is illegal, and I know I will need documentation. Documentation for what? A report to the labor board or whatever other organization handles wage theft. A report I will not make, even if I have proof. Why? Because the amount of money taken from my wages, the amount of labor value surrendered, is still less than what I would lose if I lost my job. I need a job to survive. The economy is on a downturn, and jobs are hard to come by. Someone would replace me in an instant. It would be nothing for the owner, and Bossman knows this. He knows this and weaponizes it. The more impoverished the working class, the easier they are to exploit, and the more profit can be made. If he is doing this to me, surely he is doing it to everyone else. Surely there is a housekeeper who has had wages deducted for missed spots when cleaning. Surely there are others. There are others. American workers lose an estimated $50 billion a year due to wage theft. Ever been told to clock out and keep working? Wage theft. Had missing hours on your check and could not get it fixed? Wage theft. Made a mistake at work and were forced to pay for it? Wage theft. It is an institutional problem, a societal problem, and a problem of capitalism.
We hate the slumlord, but the slumlord is the perfect representation of the American spiritual disease. We hate him, but he is so deeply rewarded by our society: the nice cars, the property ownership, the power to exploit workers, and the money made doing it. All he had to do was commit to the spirit of this land: โFuck you, got mine.โ We should replace โIn God We Trustโ with โFuck You, Got Mine.โ The Son of God said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. If that is the case, what God do we trust if not the God of capital?