Talk to Angelina, the ladies said. She speaks better English. The women were maids at the Holiday Inn at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Some had worked there more than 20 years, some five or 10. They came from China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cambodia, Thailand, happy to find jobs that required strong bodies and minimal English.

There she is, they said, pointing. That's Angelina.

Angelina Mann came walking down the sidewalk, a wiry 59-year-old woman in a red turtleneck and plaid scarf. She smiled broadly under a red baseball cap that identified her as "Picket Captain, Unite Here Local 2.'' It had been five days so far since the Holiday Inn and nine other San Francisco hotels locked out their employees in response to the union's decision to strike against four other hotels. Workers and management are battling over health care, pensions, wages and the duration of a contract.

It was the first work stoppage in Mann's 22 years as a maid at the Holiday Inn.

"We're supposed to be working, not be here on the picket line,'' she said. "We work for them for a long time. They are supposed to put their heart with us.''

Inside the hotel, a different kind of drama was unfolding. A lockout or strike is like the film ''Rashomon.'' The single event plays out in a hundred separate stories, each seen through a hundred individual lenses.

A temporary front-desk clerk imported from another Holiday Inn looked up to find a tense customer staring at her. "Our room ready yet?'' the man asked.

"Name?''

"Wallace.''

The clerk tapped some keys on her computer. "Not yet, Mr. Wallace. It is still being cleaned.''

The man had had enough. He exploded. "What is the problem with you folks? Get the manager up here!''

A few more taps on the computer. Another room was found and the key handed to Mr. Wallace, who abruptly turned and tromped to the elevator, pulling the hotel luggage cart behind him.

On the third floor, the reason for the delay became apparent. A young woman in jeans and T-shirt wiped strands of hair from her sweaty forehead as she emerged from a cluttered guest room. She was 6 1/2 hours into her first day as a maid. The young woman and her cleaning partner were supposed to clean 40 rooms by 4 p.m.

It was already 2:30, and they still had 20 rooms left. Her cart in the hallway was stacked so high with dirty towels that, when she pushed another armful onto it, half the pile toppled to the floor.

"This,'' she said in broken English, "is very hard job.''

Outside, Mann and her fellow maids said they weren't happy with the women who crossed the picket line, but they knew how the young woman probably felt. Mann said she cried her first day, the work was so hard and her pace so slow. She could barely move when she got home.

"Once you learn the technique for making a bed, you can do it faster,'' she said. "There are some tricks. You got to move your body, like you're exercising. But sometimes I still don't take a lunch to get through the 14 rooms.''

Each maid has a section of 14 rooms to clean per eight-hour shift. That means, in general, making 28 beds. At 10 tucks per bed -- for bottom sheet, top sheet, blanket and bedspread -- they are lifting mattresses and tucking in fabric roughly 280 times a day.

"Everybody's wrists hurt,'' said Maria Cortez, a 57-year-old maid who has put in 21 years at the Holiday Inn. "Your knees hurt. Your back.'' The other women, who had gathered around Mann and Cortez, nodded. They earn $15 an hour, about $1,600 a month take-home, they said, plus benefits. They said they liked their jobs, but when they are plucking individual pieces of cereal from the carpet -- "Just like you are planting rice, one by one,'' Mann said -- they wished their bosses had more appreciation.

Cortez pulled up her pant leg to show the rough, darkened patch of skin on her knee from years of kneeling on carpets and bathroom floors. "They think it's easy to do the rooms,'' she said of management. "But they didn't try it yet.''

Mann had spent 12 hours on the picket line the day before. She was ready to spend another 12 on this day, and the next and the next if necessary. She was smiling because she is always smiling. She is one of those people. Even so, she said she was worried. This week is fine. Mann and most of her co-workers have already paid their October bills. But what about November?

What she wants, Mann said, is a decent contract so she could get back inside the Holiday Inn, back to her 14 rooms, the place she said has become something like a home for her.

"I love my job. I want to work here until I get retirement. If we are sacrificing in our work up there,'' she said, pointing to the upper-floor windows, "we have to sacrifice even more out here to get our jobs back.''

Around the corner, at a different entrance to the hotel, picketers banged plastic buckets and slapped wooden sticks against cardboard picket signs, making a purposeful racket. "Don't check in! Check out now!'' one worker chanted into a megaphone. The noise rattled through the glass doors and into the lobby, where guests lounged on couches and armchairs, waiting for shuttles to the airport, or for their rooms to be cleaned.

Upstairs, the young woman on her first day pushed her overflowing cart to the next room. Twenty-one down. Nineteen more to go.