Cook
Establishment: Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Location: Chicago
Now I won’t say that the Ritz-Carlton is the worst job I ever had, but it’s in the team photo. The insane war between the patently incompetent management staff and the bloated, greedy, incestuous worker’s Union makes for the most poisonous work environment I have ever seen. I left of my own accord, and am considered rehireable by the Four Seasons company (which runs the Ritz), but my experience at the hotel may have soured me on 4S as well.
A few years ago, the hotel was slated to be sold, and so all of the talent jumped ship to avoid being sold along with it. The Ritz was left with B-teamers to run the show until the sale went down. Unfortunately, the hotel was not sold, and the largely worthless management staff was left intact. From the department managers to the HR staff, the support in place for the wage employees is dismal. When I, in having difficulty with the manager of my department, approached HR for some arbitration, I was told to speak to my manager. I replied that my problem was with him, and so I did not feel comfortable talking to him directly. I was told that I was lucky to have a job. What?
Conversely, the largely corrupt and overfed Union rewards nothing beyond laziness and whining, along with loyalty. Loyalty, that is, to the Union. The Union employees at the Ritz-Carlton are (with several notable exceptions) the laziest, most opportunistic, bad-tempered and pampered people I have ever met. Wholly worthless in that special way which makes the few hardworking employees work even harder to reel in the slack. The shop stewards, while really designed to be employee advocates, are so inflated with fake power that they hold their influence for ransom against favors from the very employees they are supposed to be assisting. The union should be called Local 1 Quid Pro Quo.
As the economy tanked, the RC began paring back the management staff and dumping their responsibilities on the wage employees in those departments. Once, not long before I decided to leave, I was written up for failure to complete an obviously management-oriented task while simultaneously being yelled at for unauthorized overtime. I was expected to add 50 hours of management responsibilities to my 40 hour work-week and not require any overtime! I’m no mathematician, but 50 plus 40 does not equal 40.
There is an inexcusable culture of contentiousness and wrongheaded blameshifting at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. If you are lazy and want to be slightly overpaid for relatively unskilled labor while being yelled at for things outside of your control and producing subpar product and services, this is the place for you.
Comments
Hi, I am a manager at the Ritz and I do like to screw around with people. Once, to see if she would do it, I asked a lady I was interviewing to sing “Puttin on the Ritz”. She did. I told her she didn’t get the job because she was dumb plus a bad singing voice. She called some lawyer and when he called, I told him I never asked anyone to sing and she didn’t get the job because I hired someone more qualified. He never called back.
As much as I hope the above post is a joke, I would not be surprised if a snot-nosed, cheap suit-wearing, arrogant, know-nothing hotel middle manager did something so horrible to a human being looking for a job during a recession. I have worked with incompetent, underpaid/overworked managers in the hotel industry and the combination of stupid AND mean is unbearable in the workplace. The person interviewed is better off not working in such an environment, although for the sake of mankind I truly hope this post was an unfortunate attempt at humor.
P.S. I wondered if the lawyer was smart enough to contact Human Resources? I think I’ll forward the above post to that department right now!
Great write-up! One hotel is as fucked up as the other and almost all the management sucks out loud!!! Every time I have applied for a job at the Four Seasons or the Ritz, I have had to deal with the most pretentious assholes on the planet. Glad now that neither ever hired me