‘Don’t let our families starve’
Latina worker copes with furlough amid pandemic
The Sheraton Phoenix Downtown is Arizona’s largest and tallest hotel. It was built to cater to large convention groups, with 1,003 rooms stacked between 31 floors like a giant layer cake.
At night, when Sandy Villatoro used to arrive for her housekeeping shift, she could see the hotel’s Sheraton sign glowing in red lights atop the rectangular tower.
Villatoro, who is 31 and wears large, stylish glasses, started working at the Sheraton in February 2015.
She first applied for a front desk job. But after waiting several months for a response, she tried applying for a housekeeping position. She was called the next day.
Villatoro started out cleaning rooms during the day. She worked alongside a housekeeping staff made up mostly of other Latina women like her, many of them immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador and Guatemala. The women could sometimes be seen standing outside the rear service entrance waiting for rides, chatting in Spanish in their navy blue uniforms.
Villatoro was born in Guatemala but has lived in the U.S. nearly her entire life. She speaks English and Spanish, having been brought to this country when she was just two months old.
After her daughter, Persephony, was born in October 2020, Villatoro asked for a transfer to the night shift. That way she could care for her baby during the day while her husband, Patrick, a roofer, worked and her 10-year-old son, Etheny, was at school.
Instead of cleaning rooms, she spent the night restocking dozens of cleaning carts hauled down to the ground floor on a service elevator from 5 p.m. until the end of her shift at 1 a.m. She then would
Villatoro sometimes skipped meals for days, drinking water to fight back hunger pangs, so that her children had food.
drive home to pump milk for her baby and sleep a few hours before getting up at 7 a.m. to make breakfast for her son and help him get ready for school.
It was not an easy life. Then the new coronavirus pandemic hit. And life got much harder.
Villatoro was earning $13.15 an hour when she was furloughed from her job after guests began canceling reservations in droves.
Villatoro’s final day was March 28, 2020. She spent her last shift with hardly anything to do because most of the hotel’s 1,003 rooms were vacant. Villatoro walked out that night thinking she would be back at work in a few weeks, maybe a month.
A year later, the Sheraton Phoenix
Downtown still hasn’t reopened. And Villatoro has not returned to her housekeeping job.
Bills piled up. Villatoro and her husband fell behind on their rent. They struggled to scrape together enough money to buy food for the family and diapers for the baby, who was not yet six months old when Villatoro was furloughed.
During the worst times, Villatoro sometimes skipped meals for days, drinking water to fight back hunger pangs, so that her children had food.
“If I was really hungry, then I would eat, if not I would just make my son eat,” Villatoro said.
Latina workers hit hardest
More than 20 million workers lost jobs in the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic. Villatoro belongs to the group that has been hit the hardest: Latina women.
The overall unemployment rate
jumped from 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.8% in April, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, after states imposed lockdowns and stay-at-home orders and millions of Americans were laid off or furloughed.
For Latina women, the unemployment rate soared even higher, from 6% in March to 20% in April 2020. That was the highest unemployment rate of any group during the pandemic, according to BLS data.
Unemployment rates have since dropped for all groups as the economy recovers. As of February, Latina women still had the highest unemployment rate of any group, 8.5% compared to 6.1% overall, according to the BLS statistics.
Latina women were hard hit during the pandemic in large part because many are employed in the leisure and hospitality industry, which lost more jobs than any other sector during the pandemic. Twenty-four percent of hospitality workers are Latino, a large share of them Latina women.
The hospitality industry also has been the slowest industry to rebound during the economic recovery, BLS data shows.
During the peak of the recession, the U.S. economy lost more than 7.4 million hospitality jobs from March 2020 to April 2020, according to BLS data, a 46% decrease. Hospitality jobs made up 36% of the overall jobs lost nationally during that period, an analysis of BLS data shows.
In Arizona, hospitality jobs made up an even greater share of the overall jobs lost during the pandemic. From March 2020 to April 2020, the state lost 327,500 jobs, a 41% decrease. Of the those, 135,900 were hospitality jobs, which made up 43% of the overall jobs lost in Arizona, the data shows.
Hospitality industry slowest to rebound
Hospitality jobs also have been slowest to rebound. Jobs in Arizona were down 3.8% in January 2021 compared to 12 months earlier, according to BLS data. As of January, there were still 22% fewer hospitality industry jobs nationally (17% fewer in Arizona) than 12 months earlier, the biggest job deficit of any industry by far, according to BLS data.
In addition to losing jobs, many unemployed women in the hospitality industry couldn’t look for other job opportunities because many had to stay home and care for children after schools and day care centers closed during the pandemic.
So they were squeezed from two sides, said Felix Koenig, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
On the one hand, there was the loss of their job, Koenig said, and on the other it became more difficult “to find new employment opportunities while having to take care of children without having child-care access.”
The sudden loss of jobs and and slow return to work has exacerbated wage gaps for Latina women that existed before the pandemic, said Meggie Weiler, senior economic policy analyst at UnidosUS, a civil rights organization.
“They are facing this ever-prevalent wage gap that prevents them or keeps them from building wealth or building a financial safety net that they could fall back on in the time of economic hardships such as the one we’re in,” Weiler said.
Convention business loss was the final blow
Villatoro’s baby was born Oct. 4. After taking three months off, she returned to work at the Sheraton on Dec. 27 – just in time for the busy season, when tourists flock to Arizona to escape the cold and enjoy the state’s weather.
The tourist season usually peaks in March when spring breakers arrive, Spring Training is in full swing, and downtown hotels are booked solid with large convention groups.
The weeks leading up to March of last year was no different. The Sheraton
Phoenix Downtown was so busy that Villatoro had been taking on extra shifts. But by mid-March, as concerns over the growing pandemic grew and cancellations mounted, her shifts were cut.
The final blow came after a large convention group from Washington state that had booked 75% of the hotel’s rooms canceled its trip to Arizona, Villatoro said.
Villatoro remembers being partly relieved because at the time Washington state was experiencing one of the first coronavirus outbreaks in the country. She was afraid of being infected and bringing the virus home to her family.
But it also made her worried about losing her job.
Then on March 14, Villatoro’s 31-yearold cousin, Jessica Vargas Salazar, a mother of two, died from breast cancer.
Villatoro and Vargas had grown up together in Las Vegas like sisters. Their mothers used to dress them in identical outfits right down to their shoes.
Villatoro asked for some time off so she could drive to Houston for her cousin’s funeral.
On the drive back to Phoenix on March 20, the day after the funeral, Villatoro pulled over at a rest stop in Texas to get some gas. There was a voicemail on her phone from her supervisor. Villatoro anxiously called right back. “I’ve been calling everybody to tell them they are being laid off because there is no work anymore since they are starting to shut down everything. So your last day is going to be the 28th,’” Villatoro recalls her supervisor telling her.
Villatoro was confused.
“I asked her,” Villatoro recalled. “I’m going to work on the 28th and that’s it? Or am I not going to work at all? And she was like, ‘Yeah, you are going to come into work the 28th, work your eight hours and then you are going to clock out and that is going to be it.”
Villatoro was in shock. “We were in our peak season and usually our peak season doesn’t end until the ending of May.”
On the rest of the 10-hour trip back to Phoenix, Villatoro had to push away thoughts of losing her cousin and now her job.
“Especially since I had my two kids in the car, I was just trying to focus on driving and not worrying about anything,” Villatoro said.
Bills to pay but no money
Over the next several months, Villatoro and her family fell deeper and deeper into debt.
At first Villatoro thought they’d get by on her husband’s $500-a-week pay and their savings. The couple hoped to buy a house in 2020 and had saved up $2,000 for a down payment.
With lots of bills to pay, they quickly burned through their savings. For starters, there was the $800-a-month rent. The $372-a-month car payment for her 2017 Chevy Sonic, plus $170-a-month for car insurance.
There was the $150 internet bill, which jumped to $200 a month after Villatoro switched providers to get highspeed internet for her fourth-grade son. He needed the faster service after schools closed and classes went to online learning.
There were other expenses, like groceries
and baby diapers. Villatoro was sometimes spending as much as $160 a month alone on diapers.
Under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, enacted in March 2020, the federal government started providing $600 a week in unemployment insurance benefits on top of unemployment benefits provided by individual states. Arizona pays a maximum of $240 a week in unemployment insurance benefits, one of the lowest amounts of any state.
Villatoro has a federal permit that allows her to work legally in the U.S. under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. She didn’t apply at first because she worried that receiving unemployment benefits could jeopardize her chances of getting a green card.
Villatoro said she was starting the process of applying for a green card through her husband, Patrick, a U.S. citizen.
At the time, former President Donald Trump’s “public charge” rule was winding through the courts. The rule sought to make it it harder for immigrants who had received public benefits to get green cards, as legal permanent residency visas are known.
After hearing from legal experts that applying for unemployment insurance benefits should not affect her green card application under the “public charge” rule, Villatoro decided to apply.
It was the middle of May by the time Villatoro began receiving unemployment insurance payments, after her first application was rejected. By then Villatoro had been out of work for six weeks. They were behind $600 on their rent, and their cupboards were bare.
They survived on cereal, oatmeal, cans of soup and the occasional box of Hamburger Helper.
“If we had change lying around, I would count up the change and go and buy meat,” Villatoro said. “I would make Hamburger Helper if I could.”
Villatoro also had a car payment due on the 21st.
“I was afraid my car was going to be repossessed,” Villatoro said.
She was less worried about being evicted. Their landlord was Patrick’s boss and a personal friend who allowed the couple to pay what they could and the rest later.
“In April, we paid him like $500 and in May we paid him $500,” Villatoro said.
With the additional $600 from the federal government, the unemployment insurance payments amounted to about $740 a week after taxes. That was more money than the $800 Villatoro had been taking home every two weeks after taxes at her housekeeping job at the Sheraton.
Even so, Villatoro said most of the extra income went to catching up on their bills, including the car payment and the $600 in back rent they still owed.
The additional $600 a week in federal unemployment insurance payments ran out July 25. As a result, Villatoro’s unemployment insurance dropped to $214 a week through the state. Villatoro was still unemployed. She kept receiving updates about when the Sheraton would reopen and she would go back to work. But the reopening date kept getting pushed back. In July she received an email that the hotel would reopen Aug. 1.
In August, she received another email. The hotel would reopen Sept. 1.
‘Don’t let our families starve’
On Aug. 11, Villatoro joined other jobless hospitality workers in front of the Phoenix office of former Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., for a protest calling on Congress to extend the $600 a week federal unemployment insurance payments.
The protest was organized by Unite Here Local 11, a labor union that represents hospitality workers in Arizona and parts of southern California. In news coverage of the event, Villatoro, a union steward, was seen wearing a face mask, carrying Persephony, her then 9month-old baby, in a pink onesie, her wispy black hair tied in a little ponytail on top of her head. Some of the other unemployed hospitality workers carry signs that read, “Don’t let our families starve.”
At the time, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate were locked in a debate over another economic stimulus package. Democrats wanted to extend the $600 a week federal unemployment insurance payments while Republicans wanted to reduce them to $200 a week. Many Republicans argued the additional $600 a week federal unemployment insurance benefits were discouraging laid off workers from returning to work because in many cases they were earning more staying home.
Villatoro, who said she had never received unemployment insurance before, felt insulted by the insinuation that laid off workers were “lazy.”
“I’m a working body,” Villatoro said. “I’ve been working since I was 17. I was working six and seven days a week. So to say we are lazy, it’s like a stab in the back.”
Villatoro said most of her co-workers felt the same way, “They are like, ‘I want to go back to work. I don’t want to be at home doing nothing.’”
Villatoro was eager to return to work, but she was afraid of getting infected with the virus on the job, especially when coronavirus cases spiked in June and Arizona became one of the biggest hotspots.
“I do have a 10-month-old daughter so I don’t want to go back to work and it’s not safe, especially because some people don’t even want to wear masks. Then I get sick and I bring it back to my kids,” she said.
That is partially why she kept holding out for her job at the Sheraton instead of looking for job opportunities at other hotels or elsewhere. She felt more protected from the coronavirus at the Sheraton because unlike other hotels, the Sheraton’s workers are unionized, and therefore had more of a say in safety protocols.
She didn’t want to throw away the five years of seniority she had accumulated at the Sheraton, which gave her some leverage in returning to the night shift so she could care for her children during the day.
Under a new contract the union had recently signed with the hotel’s management, Villatoro was looking forward to receiving raises over the next three years.
On Aug. 8, Trump signed an executive order that temporarily extended federal unemployment benefits to millions of out-of-work Americans.
In Arizona, the federal unemployment benefits amounted to an extra $300 a week.
For Villatoro, the extra $300 was less
than the $600 jobless workers such as her had been receiving through July 25, but it was better than nothing.
The extra $300 a week came at the right time because last summer was the hottest on record in Phoenix. Temperatures soared above 110 degrees on 53 days, forcing their landlord to charge them an extra $100 to $150 per month to cover utility bills usually included in their rent.
Summer is the slow season in the roofing industry. Villatoro’s husband, Patrick, was working fewer hours, which meant even less income.
As a DACA recipient, Villatoro has a Social Security number and therefore is qualified for several rounds of stimulus checks, which were based on household income and the number of dependents. Villatoro’s family received a total of $3,400 in the first round of stimulus checks in April and $2,400 in the second round in late December.
The stimulus money helped keep them afloat, for a while.
Things got really bad
In mid-August, her husband stopped by for lunch at the house they rent on the east side of Phoenix and heard water gushing. Villatoro was not home. Her husband discovered a water pipe had burst under the floor between the kitchen and living room. The family had to move in with Villatoro’s sister-in-law for a week while workers dug up the floor and repaired the broken pipe. The whole broken pipe ordeal just added to their stress.
Villatoro received another email informing workers that the Sheraton’s reopening had been pushed back yet again, to Oct. 1.
By the fall, Villatoro had given up waiting for the Sheraton to reopen.
“Things had gotten really bad financially, so I finally gave up and started looking for a job,” Villatoro said.
Her sister-in-law told her Amazon was hiring warehouse workers. Villatoro applied and “they hired me right away.”
She started working Nov. 8 at the Amazon warehouse in Goodyear. She makes $15 an hour as a “picker” gathering products to fill orders, plus an extra 85 cents an hour differential for working nights.
During the holiday season, Villatoro was earning time-and-a-half overtime pay for working 11 hours a day, four days a week Sunday through Thursday.
By the time Christmas came, Villatoro and her husband were getting back on their feet financially.
After sometimes having had to scrounge around for change just to buy food, they now had enough money to splurge on an $80 computer keyboard and mouse that lights up in different colors as a Christmas present for their son, Etheny.
Life slowly returning to normal
The overtime ended after the holidays and Villatoro has since gone back to working 40 hours a week. She works four 10-hours a days. Her shifts at Amazon starts at 6:30 p.m. and ends at 5 a.m. She gets home about the time her husband leaves for work, then sleeps for two or three hours and gets up to feed Persephony, who is now almost a year and a half old and just started to walk and talk. She sleeps for another hour or two in the afternoon when Persephony naps, then makes dinner before heading back to work.
A year since Villatoro was furloughed from her housekeeping job at the Sheraton, life is starting to turn back to the way it was before the pandemic. Her son, Etheny, now a fifth-grader at William T. Machan Elementary School, returned to in-person learning on March 16.
For her 31st birthday on March 5, Villatoro celebrated by bleaching her black hair blond.
In the third round of stimulus checks, Villatoro’s family received $5,600. Some of the money will go toward the $495 cost of renewing her DACA application and for legal fees to pay for the process of getting a green card, Villatoro said.
She and her husband plan to set aside some of the stimulus money for the house they still hope to buy.
Villatoro last heard the Sheraton will reopen on May 1. A Sheraton spokesperson confirmed that is the target date to reopen. Workers who were furloughed should be offered their jobs first, a union representative said.
But Villatoro is now unsure if she will go back when the Sheraton finally reopens, because she has grown to like the warehouse job at Amazon and the three-day weekends give her more time with her family.
The hole where workers dug up the floor to fix the water pipe that broke in August still hasn’t been retiled. Covered with tape, the ugly hole is reminder of the awful last 12 months.
“It’s been stressful,” Villatoro said, sitting on the sofa in her living room, Persephony on her lap. “No one should have to go through that.”