She worked under time pressure for $17.70 an hour, plus overtime. Ten-hour days of making beds and scrubbing toilets was the new normal, up from her usual eight-hour shift.

Many of her coworkers didn’t return, and the hotel was short-staffed. When the casinos closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she weathered unemployment only to find that her job had gone from tough to brutal.

Kolada Richardson returned to work cleaning hotel rooms at Detroit’s MGM Grand in May 2021 after more than a year off the job.