Next Sunday, at the Labour party conference in Brighton, the battle to improve the lot of chambermaids in London’s luxury hotels takes a unique turn when a powerfully illustrated graphic story, Tale of Two Cities, is launched as a recruitment tool for Unite.

In a sector in which English is rarely the first language and unions are unwelcome, pictures can speak volumes. The artist behind the story is Barbara Pokryszka, who came to London from Poland in 2008. The images reflect her experience working for four years in the Hilton London Metropole, a four-star hotel charging up to several hundred pounds a night. It also tells the story of many hotels’ cleaning staff who are harassed, bullied and dissuaded from taking collective action.

In one illustration, a supervisor bellows at a weeping room attendant: “You are the worst maid in the world… Get up and change the bed again! You don’t come here for a holiday!” The maid is based on Pokryszka herself.

“I thought if I learned English, acquired skills, I would do well,” Pokryszka says. “But every month, the criticism grew worse and worse. After a time you become irrational. You become brainwashed. Room attendants would say, ‘They must be right. I am bad.’ I never had a complaint and regular guests would ask for me, but my confidence was stripped away.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barbara Pokryszka: ‘It was obvious to me that I needed union representation.’

Pokryszka, 38, is a poet, painter, cartoonist and ceramicist. She also has a degree in sculpting. At home in Poland, she ran her own gallery, taught art and her work sold well. In 2008, aged 31, she moved to London, she says, to broaden her horizons and develop her art. But she also needed to earn a living. She had no relevant references, no English, “Just ‘hi’ and ‘bye’,” she smiles. “I was very happy I found a job.”

She talks softly, sipping green tea in a coffee shop in the Hilton Metropole, the same central London hotel in which she once worked. As she talks, her fragility is obvious and the tears, for which she apologises unnecessarily, fall often. Three years ago, she was suspended from her job for three months because her employer said she had contacted the media about conditions, a charge she denies.

“At least I could afford to buy brushes and oils and I had time to paint,” she says of that time. She subsequently suffered a near-breakdown because of work-related stress and has been receiving sick pay ever since. Her counsellor suggested that she illustrate her working life as therapy. The graphic story is the outcome.

The two cities of the title are London and New York. A room attendant in London is likely to earn the minimum wage of £6.50 an hour, employed by an outsourced contractor, an agency. In New York, hotels directly employ cleaning staff. The sector is about 80% unionised and the rate is at least £16 an hour for a 35-hour week with strong health and safety rules and good working conditions, delivering an income that takes staff into the professional middle class.

When Pokryszka began work, she joined the union, and found only one other member in her hotel. “It was obvious to me that I needed union representation,” she says. “I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know my rights. I had no family. What I couldn’t understand was why others were too scared to join.”

The Hilton outsources cleaning to a company called WGC Services. In London, WGC also employs the room attendants at the Park Plaza County Hall hotel, which the Observer wrote about in May. The group of a dozen or so women room attendants, all Unite union members, who work at the Park Plaza are in negotiation with WGC, which wants to increase the number of rooms the women clean a day from 13 to 15. WGC says: “We are actively collaboratively engaged with Unite the Union.”

Last week, the Resolution Foundation thinktank estimated that chancellor George Osborne’s higher minimum wage, rising from £7.20 next April to £9 by 2020, would increase costs by less than 1% in most sectors, but hospitality could see an increase in its wage bill of 3.4%.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An excerpt from Barbara Pokryszka’s Tale of Two Cities.

It looks like an argument for continuing to keep hourly rates low in hotel cleaning and for contractors to employ only those under 25 – who would be exempt from the new higher minimum wage. However, in the US, MIT professor Zeynep Ton has drawn on a decade of research to show how companies that flourish, including those in the hospitality sector, pay employees relatively well, invest heavily in training and design their operations to encourage employee initiatives. She writes: “Companies end up with motivated, capable workers, better service and increased sales.” A fair wage is not just an issue of social justice, it makes the kind of economic sense that shareholders ought to like too.

Instead, Pokryszka’s graphic story illustrates how the discouragement of union membership and improved pay and conditions is a subtle business that spawns victims while it avoids direct management culpability. Most hotel chains outsource cleaning. The contractor employs the room attendants and, often, the supervisors too. The latter are under constant pressure to ensure dozens of rooms are cleaned to an acceptable standard, against the clock. In some cases, room attendants are told to work unpaid beyond their set hours until their quota of rooms are completed – an illegal practice that reduces the minimum hourly rate to even less. Pressures Pokryszka’s graphic story captures strikingly.

Pokryszka reckons she has cleaned 15,000 hotel rooms. Each room has a checklist of four dozen or more actions to be taken – plugs washed; vents dusted; coffee-table legs cleaned; all this on 13-18 rooms a shift. A supervisor can insist that a job is repeated again and again. So, in some hotels, maids are denied the break they are entitled to after six hours; they are “asked” to work their one day off in the week; the number of rooms they have to clean is increased to the point where they suffer muscle strain and exhaustion.

In law, after three months, an agency worker is entitled to the same pay and conditions as a member of staff directly employed by the hotel. To avoid this, some cleaning agencies offer their employees a contract that stipulates only a handful of hours a week. The maid or porter may work a 35 or 40 hour week but that is not guaranteed. Pokryszka says that she would occasionally come into work, paying for her travel, and then be told there was no shift for her that day, even though London hotels are frequently at full capacity. She says that her income dropped so low that she was unable to pay her rent and was evicted from her flat.

Pokryszka became active in the union, raising grievances about the heavy workload and encouraging colleagues to join. At one point she was offered a much-improved position and a serious pay rise, working in a block of flats away from the hotel. She turned it down. “If a rise wasn’t for everyone, it wasn’t for me,” she says.

In such a system, a contractor can deny all knowledge of what its supervisors are doing while the hotel management can say that it is the contractor’s concern. The buck stops nowhere. Pokryszka’s response is scathing. “I didn’t clean the agency’s rooms, I cleaned the rooms of the hotel.”

Have conditions improved in the three years since she was suspended? The Hilton London Metropole declined to answer specific questions about what maids earned, the number of rooms they were required to clean per shift or whether the chain welcomed union membership (Hugh O’Shea, the Unite convenor, was banned from the Hilton). A spokesman said: “We select our contractors according to strict quality criteria… We conduct regular audits to confirm, for example, that at a minimum our contractors pay each room attendant hourly and not on a “per room” basis. If we are made aware of any specific irregularities we will take the immediate necessary steps to address this.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An excerpt from Barbara Pokryszka’s Tale of Two Cities.

In New York, a logo flags up to guests the fact that their hotel offers fair wages and conditions. Unite hotel workers’ organiser Ewa Jasiewicz says guests in London also have clout. They can ask before they book if a hotel pays the living wage (the hourly rate calculated according to the UK cost of living), recognises trade unions and if waiting, bar and kitchen staff receive their tips in full. “Guests can also advocate [places] on TripAdvisor,” she says. “Guests have spending power. They need to use it.”

Today, Pokryszka’s studio is her north London bedsit. The room is dark and she has no easel. She pins her canvases to the wall to paint. Earlier this month, her work, including a portrait entitled The Lazy Maid, was part of a project called What’s Wrong With Work? funded by the Wellcome Trust. Why doesn’t she give up and return to Poland? “I love the people here,” Pokryszka says spiritedly. “When we are victimised by the greedy, we cease to believe in ourselves and in others. That has to stop. I want my art – making issues understandable without words – to inspire people. We have to fight hard for our rights because they are being taken away from us, day by day.”

More about conditions for room attendants can be found at the blog Maid in London