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The Men Behind China's Hotel Boom

December 26, 2006 at 12:28 PM | 0 Comments

[Ed. Note: Now that Ritz-Carlton is opening up three hotels in China, you may be wondering just how these hotels are getting built. Hotel Maven Tim Leffel has the depressing truth about China's building boom.]

When we stay in a hotel, few of us think about the people who put up the building. In China, there's a whole underground army of people doing nothing but.

A majority of the building is centered in Bejing as the city prepares for next winter's Olympics. This past Saturday the Wall Street Journal ran an investigative story--"So Much Work, So Little Time" on the conditions workers there endure.

They work 15-hour days or longer, seven days a week. When they topple onto their bunk beds, it is 12 to a room. There is no heat.

And there are a lot of people at work. There are more than 10,000 construction sites in Bejing. With 1.7 billion square feet of floor space under construction, it's the equivalent of three Manhattan's being built at the same time.

Like migrant workers the world over, most of these men are far from their family, living simply in order to send money home to their families. Not that there's all that much to send. "Toting their bedrolls from work site to work site, they earn as little as 50 cents per hour." And with flimsy helmets and no steel-toed boots, safety is a major issue. In 2005 alone, there were 2,607 reported fatalities. So as we enjoy time with family and friends this holiday season, let us spare a thought for the men building these hundreds of hotels.

[Photo: China.Sixty4]