>for the keks
Motel owner announced vaccine mandate. Then most of his staff quitabridged version
Nov 13, 2021
βNow this is great. Just discovered this,β says Joseph Franklyn McElroy, chuckling, as he tries to get the hardwood floors inside this cozy little motel room to sparkle. βThis is a Swiffer that steams at the same time it cleans. Itβs my favorite thing.β The steam mop with the purple handle is actually a Shark-branded product, not a Swiffer. Itβs tough, though, to fault McElroy for misidentifying this tool of the housekeeping trade. While he has become as proficient at turning over rooms at the Meadowlark Motel over the past couple months as any current cleaning staffer, changing linens and sanitizing toilets was never meant to be the New York City chief executiveβs bailiwick.
Until he decided, in August, that he wanted to bring his young twins to the place that served as his childhood home, and the place he now owns β a place where heβs trying to create memorable tourism experiences for people passing through this tiny mountain town 35 miles west of Asheville. Joseph Franklyn McElroy stands in front of the Meadowlark Motel on Oct. 8, 2021 in Maggie Valley, N.C. The only obstacle? Almost none of the people working for him at the 34-room motel had been vaccinated.
βI wanted to bring my 3-year-old children down to experience some of the things that I had experienced at the motel,β the Maggie Valley native says. βWe have a huge back (area) for recreation, a pavilion, fire pits and a fishing stream β¦ and you get lots of animals there, so they could see things they donβt see in New York. But bringing them down to an environment where a lot of unvaccinated people would be around regularly just seemed problematic.β
After giving it some thought and seeking advice from others, in August, McElroy announced the types of rule that a growing number of U.S. employers both large and small are instituting amid the Covid-19 pandemic: He announced a vaccine mandate for managers, and a mask mandate for all other employees. It didnβt go over well. He says that four room attendants, three front desk employees, an assistant manager and an assistant maintenance worker all quit in response, leaving just a manager, a laundry room employee and a maintenance worker. βI mean, they left that day,β McElroy says, βand we had a full weekend coming up, among many full weekends coming.
The day most of them quit βFor a long time, I was a terrible troll online,β McElroy says, as he sits on the back deck of the Meadowlarkβs main building. βA liberal troll. To some extent, I occasionally still can spout off in a negative way. But Iβm trying to be a better man that doesnβt do that. βCause at the end of the day, that only makes people more entrenched in their confirmation bias.β
The name Trump eventually comes up, and itβs clear he doesnβt like the former president. >100% pure kek
Which is a rather uncommon point of view here in Haywood County, where two-thirds of the voters who went to the polls last year cast their vote for Donald Trump. McElroy didnβt see the vaccine issue or the mask issue as political, though. He saw it, at least in some small way, as a means to a personal end. Starting in May, as the pandemic seemed to be receding, he returned to making regular trips down from New York β where he works as chief executive of Manhattan marketing firm Galileo Tech Media β to oversee repairs and renovations at the motel.
Eventually, he was coming down enough that he wanted to bring his family, too, so he could get done what he wanted to get done in Maggie Valley while also spending time with them. But he worried about doing so because his son and daughter were too young to get the shots. He would feel better about them staying in the two-bedroom apartment he keeps in the center of the motel, he thought, if at the very least his employees wore masks at all times, and even better, if they were fully vaccinated. So on Aug. 13, he instituted the mandates. And his entire front-desk staff and all his cleaning crew members left.
With no tricks up his sleeve that would magically solve his sudden problem, he called his younger sister, who was in town visiting with their widowed 80-year-old father. βJoe said, βCan you come down and watch the front office for a little bit?ββ Cindy Mong recalls. βI came down and I said, βWhat do you want me to do?β He said, βWell, I got rooms to clean. Iβm by myself.β I said, βUm, OK. What am I doing sitting at the front desk?β He said, βYou know how to clean rooms?β Iβm like, βJoe, duh. I cleaned rooms from the time I was in sixth grade through high school, and then Iβm a mom, and so yes, I know how to clean rooms.β
βI said, βWhy donβt we just close the front office, put a note saying call us, and letβs get these rooms clean?ββ I wasn't going to be defeated by this
βIt was really do or die,β McElroy says. βClose the place, which was heading into the peak of the season, and lose all that revenue, and not do it. Or just decide to do it. And in some ways, Iβm a real stubborn bastard. βI felt it as a personal attack in a way, and I wasnβt gonna succumb to it. β¦ I wasnβt gonna be defeated by this.β
So for several weeks β even after his sister headed back home to Florida β he raced around the property with a cart full of linens and supplies from room to room, sometimes cleaning more than a dozen a day. When someone called the front desk, it would get forwarded to his cellphone and heβd take a reservation while taking out a bag of bathroom trash. If he saw a vehicle pull into a space outside the lobby, heβd race up to check them in. Oh, and he was still trying to run his New York-based company and its staff of 15 employees, remotely. As well as interviewing new job candidates β vaccinated job candidates (or at least people willing to wear masks for their whole shift) β who could spell him.
A new appreciation for a dirty job βIβm analyzing it almost like an app,β McElroy says, referring to how his mind was working while he cleaned. βIβm sitting there analyzing the functions and processes of cleaning β which Iβve been doing so long in my business career. β¦ I long ago got rid of the revulsion factor that a lot of people canβt get over. Iβm divorced from that. It just becomes a mental analytical problem. βBecause the first few days I was dead, man. I was killing myself, and my legs and everything else (were sore).β
In short order, however, he figured out how to minimize his physical exertion while maximizing cleanliness. And with a newfound appreciation for manual labor along with a nudge from Plott, he was able to make the job more enticing to would-be applicants. βHe goes, βYou know, this is kind of revelatory for me,ββ Plott says, recalling a conversation he had with McElroy late in the summer. βHe said, βItβs like, wow, thereβs an art to this, and I think maybe weβve been taking people for granted. Maybe this minimum wage that everybody talks about needs to be raised.β I said, βYeah, I think the only way youβre gonna be able to combat this is just say, Look, weβre gonna pay the highest wages anywhere, but youβre gonna have to go along with some of the things we need to do, too.β
βHe said, βI like that idea.ββ McElroy kept the vaccine and mask mandates in place. But he raised the hourly wage for room attendants to $14 an hour. Thatβs double what it had been. Soon afterward, he hired a woman to clean after she went to get vaccinated β specifically so she could work at the Meadowlark.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/13/motel-owner-announced-vaccine-mandate-then-most-his-staff-quit/8603822002/