Saving cash, but not face

But you can’t eat a view, so she packed a small bag 40 years ago and headed north, to America.

She cleaned rooms at a hospital in North Carolina for seven years but small-town life didn’t suit her.

“I wanted to live in a city,’’ she said. “I had a cousin in Boston, so I said, ‘Why not?’ ’’

She arrived on a Friday, and by the end of the day, she had applied for a job at every hotel in town. The last place she tried was the Lenox in the Back Bay.

“It was about 5 o’clock, and I went up to the bellman and said I was looking for a job and he was so nice, he brought me to the lady who ran housekeeping. She looked at me and said, ‘You can start tomorrow.’ ’’

So Sebastiana Montero spent exactly one day without a job in Boston and has worked for the Lenox Hotel ever since. The hotel managers treat her well and she returns the favor.

It has been that way for 33 years, and Sebastiana Montero was thinking about that when she found out about the housekeepers at the Hyatt.

Some genius who works for a hotel chain where the top executives make millions figured out that Hyatt could save some money by outsourcing the housekeeping at its three Boston-area hotels, paying the new maids $8 an hour instead of $15. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before Hyatt chief executive Mark Hoplamazian and the other managers cut their own salaries in half, too, to help the company.

The genius who crunched the numbers crunched the lives of nearly 100 families, and in the process crunched the reputation of a pretty good hotel chain.

The important difference between Sebastiana Montero and the Hyatt maids is this: She belongs to a union, Local 26 of the hotel workers. Otherwise, she and 6,000 other people who work in the hotels and institutions in and around this town would be at the mercy of some bean counter.

Now, this is all quite counterintuitive, because there are many who think unions are antiquated institutions better suited for an exhibit at the Smithsonian than a seat at the table of a Darwinian, globalized economy.

But take a look at what happened to the Hyatt workers and tell Sebastiana Montero that unions are obsolete. She makes $15.73 an hour, pays $8 a week for a health plan that covers dental and medical, and is covered by work rules that protect her from a power-tripping manager trying to make a buck or a reputation.

She says the work rules are more than rules.

“They mean respect,’’ Sebastiana Montero said.

Five years ago, when 4,000 hotel workers in San Francisco got locked out of their jobs in a labor dispute, Sebastiana Montero marched on the streets of Boston to support them.

She did the same for the Hyatt workers, even though they are not unionized. Her cousin and her brothers work at nonunionized hotels around town, and they are worried.

The Hyatt workers say they were duped into training the very people who took their jobs. Hyatt denies this. Sebastiana Montero believes the workers.

“There’s nothing lower,’’ she said.

She remembers Mary Cappucci, the Italian woman who trained her at the Lenox back in 1976.

“Mary was older than me. She was so nice,’’ she said. “In two weeks, I could do eight rooms a day. Then 10. Then 16. One day, Mary said, ‘Take your shoes off. Rest.’ She was so kind.’’

If someone had told Sebastiana Montero that she was going to take Mary Cappucci’s job and make half the money for the privilege, she would have said one word: No.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.