Animal Rights: An Open Letter to Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts

With the Halekulani knocking Four Seasons off the Hawaiian Travel & Leisure throne in 2007, I find myself thinking about drooling dogs.

In 1965 researchers conducting studies based on Pavlovian conditioning hoped to show that when administered an auditory stimulus coupled with an electric shock, the behavior of dogs could be manipulated. This didn’t exactly go as planned. What the studies ultimately showed was that these dogs learned helplessness. When they were left in a small and easily exited cage, the conditioned dogs would not move even after the administration of multiple shocks. Unconditioned dogs leapt quickly from the cage while the rest lay down whimpering under shock after shock, accepting their fate. They had learned that nothing they did mattered.

It’s now 2007 and learned helplessness flourishes at the Four Seasons Resort on the privately owned island of Lana`i.

I was hired as an independent contractor and signed an agreement to earn 40 percent commission plus tips as a massage therapist in the spa. This is great money, especially coming from Oah`u where it’s hard to get that kind of scratch without strong political backing and consecutive happy endings. This was based—I was told—on my “skill” relative to other therapists in the spa who made the same or less. The week before I turned in my uniform the same person told me adamantly that I was in fact a mediocre therapist hired “in hopes that you work your way up to Four Seasons standards.” Other contractors told me repeatedly that this was done “just to get to you.”

And there in both the nervous acceptance of such bipolar reasoning and the source of it is where the dog has its day. Upwards of 30 therapists have exited in the span of the approximately one year tenure of the reigning manager. Begging the question: Where does the problem lie? But this isn’t a psychology tirade or a rant about percentages or money even, though it might seem to be on the surface.

This is for anyone who gets $8 taken from their paycheck for every 25-minute service performed to replace no more than an ounce of oil and to wash a few sheets, and is then “asked” to fold that laundry. For anyone with the balls to question that fiscal logic, told the issue was not to be revisited and later labeled by management reactionary, arrogant and a planter of “ideas.”

For anyone who had to travel—by boat or plane—to work and found that their schedule was changed or that they wouldn’t be needed after all and in lieu of an actual explanation, told to deal with it.

For a wife and son and daughter recklessly threatened with homelessness after their father’s twelve years with the company was dashed in an instant without warning following his termination and consequent expiration of employee housing.

This is for the receptionist 7 months pregnant with incapacitating back pain who limped out of work for emergency care barely able to speak and was told. “If you get finished before 4, come back.”

Dogs do what dogs do and given the right motivation, humans are as predictable as any dog. When you can work three days out of the week and come home with $1500 that makes you motivated. And apparently in the eyes of this hotel, expendable, easily replaced and open to the kind of abuse that if applied to a unionized workforce might result in a fistfight.

This is also not a shot at an old boss by a disgruntled ex-employee. It’s a question to an entity that allows the kind of free form tyranny that traumatizes people on a daily basis to the point that they dread, not only their work environment but also the threat of having to leave it.

The question is: Why are people in 2007 treated like animals were 1965?