NEWS: Tis the Season

CULTURE: Tis the Season

Now that travel season is in full force, this news from Salon's Broadsheet is especially relevant.

What is housekeeping work like?

- Hotel housekeepers are facing increasing injuries due to heavyworkloads. In most hotels, housekeepers must clean 15 or more rooms per day.

- Hotel housekeepers must rush to meet a daily quota of cleaned rooms. They frequently skip rest periods and meals in order to finish, and even work off the clock to meet their quotas.

- In recent years, corporate hotel chains such as Hilton, Hyatt and Sheraton have increased both the pace and the amount of work performed by housekeepers.

- Most hotels have recently introduced new room amenities without reducing the number of rooms assigned to housekeepers each day. Luxury beds with heavier mattresses and linens, triple-sheeting, duvets, and extra pillows are increasingly common. Other add-ons like coffee pots, exercise equipment and large hard-to-clean mirrors make room cleaning more difficult and time-consuming.

- Hotel workers have a 40% higher injury rate (5.9%) than workers in the service sector (4.2%).

- According to a recent study of company records covering thousands of employee injuries, hotel housekeepers face an injury rate of 10.4%, almost double the injury rate for non-housekeepers (5.6%).

- Sprains and strains are the most common housekeeper injuries (44% of all injuries in one study) often resulting from demanding tasks like bed making—lifting mattresses, adding extra sheets, and stuffing multiple pillows and duvets—and pushing heavy carts full of linens and amenities.

- In a recent survey of more than 600 hotel housekeepers in the U.S. and Canada, 91% said that they have suffered work-related pain. 77% said their workplace pain interfered with routine activities. Two out of every three workers visited their doctor to deal with workplace pain. 66% took pain medication just to get through their daily quota.

- Hotel housekeeper injuries are debilitating. Back injuries, housemaids’ knee (bursitis), and shoulder pain can lead to permanent disability.

- When injured workers try to return to work, most hotels do not offer them lighter tasks to do, forcing them to choose between getting hurt again or not working at all.

You can support the housekeeper's campaign by reading and agreeing to a pledge that you will:

- avoid hotels where workers are on strike;

- support union hotels (the site, unfortunately, requires you to enter the name of a specific hotel in a specific town; it would be a lot nicer if you could just search by city, assuming a full list would be too long to effectively navigate).

- TIP YOUR MAID $2-$5/day*

- be considerate by putting trash in trash cans, leaving dirty towels on the counter or racks so the housekeeper doesn't have to bend over to pick them up; and stripping your own bedsheets;

- leave complimentary comment cards if you are happy with your maid service;

- keep a copy of the pledge in your suicase to remind you of it when you travel.

After you sign the pledge, you can buy a luggage tag to remind you of the pledge, plus make your luggage identifiable. 75% of the cost of the tag is tax-deductible. And maybe, if you're lucky, occasionally give you an opportunity to talk to other travelers about the campaign.


*I always try to tip $1-2, but I often forget, and apparently I've been being a cheapskate. I'll do better in the future. I find a lot of people don't know that you should tip the maid, and I'll always remember the woman who cried and hugged Mr. B. because, after cleaning the rooms of Mr. B.'s entire class of Air Force Weapons School guys for an entire summer, he was apparently one of the very few people who tipped her--$100. For three months of maid service.

Bitch_PhD hates housework.

My girlfriend is a cleaning lady at the company I work for. She (and all her colleagues) are constantly getting screwed over by the bosses. Being asked to do more work in less time (and thus for less money). I can only imagine that hotel workers get treated even worse....

Many people, especially businessMEN, are always quick to put down those who do the simple jobs. The jobs that anyone can do, but that still have to be done. They treat these people like shit. Thinking: "Oh, that work is so easy. We can replace these people in a heart beat." and it's fucking wrong!

I for one will never stay at a hotel where the cleaning staff (or any others) are on strike.

A great many of them are minorities as well.

I'm a housekeeper.
Most of the girls at my hotel are doing between 10-14 rooms a day. At one point we only had 1 day off a week.
Recently I developed tendonitis in my left wrist.
My bosses didn't do much about it, even after I brought in a note saying I couldn't vacuum, lift more than 5 pounds, and do anything that irritated it. (which was about everything I did) Their excuse? "Well, you can use your other hand can't you?"
So after doing 10 rooms today my arm is pretty sore. My physical therapist isn't going to be happy tomorrow.

Anyway, thank you for this article. It's nice to know that someone out there is thinking about us.

Relevancy? True or false, a person is a person?

At the hotel I work at, I would say that approximatley two of the housekeepers are minorities. I don't give a shit if the people cleaning the rooms at the hotel are jamacians or my white girlfriend, their job SUCKS. What the fuck. Way to make it into a fucking race issue.

At least the place that I work at has an in-house physical therapy center, so when I get shin splints from running around on the concrete floor in the kitchen and CherryCoke develops tendonitis, at least we don't need to go someplace else to get patched up.

Repetitive stress injuries suck... (And your boss sucks, too.) I've never had to do housekeeping professionally but I've had two or three such chronic injuries during my long years working retail grocery jobs. They're really hard to heal unless you can manage to get out of the exact type of work you're doing long enough to let them heal, which is obviously not always an option for most people with pressing economic needs, little or no insurance, and lack of other skills to fall back on. I hope you get better...

I didn't realize that work-related injuries were so common for housekeepers. Thanks for the article, Bitch_PhD.

I've always thought those sort of attitudes are incomprehensible. I guess some people think that the position at the top of the pyramid, where you can profit off of the labor of others, is the most necessary position in society.

Excellent article!

The situations in this, and other service oriented industries tend to go un-noticed by paying patrons. Besides the injuries from strain and repetitive stress... there is the psychological factor of serving management and patrons, who treat them with less dignity that most would treat a pack-animal.

There's one other thing I'd add to your list...
And that is to treat and talk to these, and all other service-oriented wageslaves as FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS!!!

thanks for the article!
i was a housekeepper for 5 months and all the negatives you mentioned were true we were only allowed two 10 minute breaks and had to get all the rooms cleaned (regardless of the amount of rooms we had) in six hours. now if i go to a hotel i leave the housekeeper a tip and include a note that the moneys for them because i don't know if its the same at every hotel but the housekeeper can't take money from a room unless there's a note that states that that's a tip for them instead of money that the guest has left lying around.

The relevance is that immigrants often end up working shit-ass jobs because employers think they can be taken advantage of and because they are often afraid of organizing--especially nowadays, when everyone loves to harass anyone with an accent. That and racism means that working-class women with dark skin have a harder time getting jobs as oh, say, the front desk person.

Pointing out the fact isn't "making" it a race issue. It's noticing that there *is* a race issue.

Crap, I didn't know that. I'll leave a note or hand it to the housekeeper in person from now on. Thanks.

Ok, I don't strip my own bedsheets, but I don't ask for them to be changed every day, either. As for picking up trash and not leaving towels on the floor...it wouldn't even occur to me not to. I generally pick up my own hotel room before the maid gets there. (Yes, I know I'm ill, but that's beside the point, right?)

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised people don't do that, after I've seen what the animals do at the health club. Wet towels on the floor, paper towels that missed the trash, water all over the counters.

Fuck...why can't people just learn to pick up after themselves?

We have emigration problems... lots of kids end up without their mom because she went to be a cleaning lady across the world The minimum wage of my country is $170 USD a month

So true. As a formal house keeper I worked with plenty of imigrates(who are great people by the way). all said they where doign this for there familys.

Come on people tip those housekeepers.

Tip your cleaning lady.

Good to know. When I travel, I keep the "DO NOT DISTURB" sign up for my entire stay to prevent housekeeping visits that I don't need. I don't use a perfectly bleached set of sheets every night at home, so why do I need them when I'm staying in a hotel? Anyway, I'd like the think that if more people did that, it would make the housekeeper's workload less insane.

"nickel and dimed" is a REALLY good book about this kind of stuff. everyone should read it.

exactly. and it obviously depends where the hotel is. maybe you have only two immigrants working at your hotel, but every hotel i've ever stayed at (mostly on the west coast) has had what appears to be more like 99%.

The only thing I wonder about that is, when I've left the DND sign up all morning, at some point someone knocks on my door and says they're very sorry to disturb me, but do I want my room cleaned? And I get the impression that they have to hang around and/or clean the room by a certain time, and that if I don't let them clean the room, that that fucks with their schedule or their boss or something. Maybe leave a note at the front desk or something that says you don't want/need maid service?

I'm typing just outside my hotel room right now.

So.

If putting the DND sign up might fuck with a cleaning lady's schedule/quota, then let them clean your room, and make sure your room needs as little cleaning as possible. Usually all that needs doing in any room I'm staying in is the sheets being re-tucked in (I'm pretty sure I don't get clean new sheets every day, and my last trip a few months back involved me staying in my room and working on the laptop while the lady cleaned around me, so I saw what she did), and some basic dusting and replacing of anything I used in the bathroom.

Most hotels I've stayed in lately have signs in the bathroom inviting you to re-use your towels, so I do that too.

I've been in the hotel business for several years, as front desk and management. And I have to agree with the venerable Dr. Housekeepers get the shaft every day. Lowest pay, heaviest workloads, least amount of respect. Even when the hotel management is on the up and up, completely following the rules regarding pay, breaks, etc., housekeepers have the worst job. Unfortunately in almost every hotel I've worked at, the management does not follow the rules. They cheat, cut corners, and out right lie. Underpay, over work, and generally take advantage of people who usually don't know their rights.

I respect the housekeepers. They're the backbone of any hotel. Without a good housekeeping staff, you can't have a good hotel.

The only problem with this, is that some hotels pay the housekeepers by the number of rooms they clean instead of by the hour. So if you leave the dnd sign up so they don't clean your room, they actually lose income for the day. If they don't clean it, they don't get paid. Shitty situation.

I'm hardly saying that the hotel has only two immigrants. We have an ENORMOUS Visa-worker force. I can safely say that all of our utility people in the kitchens are foreign, most of them from Ecuador, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, etc. We just picked up a woman from Mexico in Garde Manger, actually. I just think that treating something that is a workers issue as a race issue is ridiculous, and it makes it seem that all the white people that are doing the same shitty job aren't as important as the minorities.