Hotel Housekeeping Can be Hazardous

The Salt Lake Tribune: A housekeeper was hospitalized Sunday after a can of bear spray discharged in the Marriott Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City.

The woman was pushing her housekeeping cart on the 6th floor of the hotel, near 100 South and West Temple, when the cart bumped a can of bear spray that had been left on the floor of the hall.

The can sprayed when it was struck, shooting out a substance that "is like pepper spray, only 10 times stronger," said Salt Lake City battallion fire chief Clair Baldwin. Investigators were trying to determine why the can was left in the hallway.

The woman was unable to open her eyes after being exposed to the spray, so she was taken to a hospital, Baldwin said. All guests at the hotel were evacuated for about a half hour while crews ventilated the building.

No one else required medical care, Baldwin said.

NYC Sofitel Changes Housekeeper Dress Code

New York Post: Female staff at the Manhattan hotel where former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly sexually assaulted a chambermaid were being allowed Thursday to wear trousers instead of skirts, after a protest from employees, a union official said.

Sofitel, a hotel chain that prides itself on a traditional dress code, made the concession amid concern about the vulnerability of chambermaids after Strauss-Kahn was charged over allegations that he sexually assaulted and tried to rape a 32-year-old housekeeper.

The alteration of its uniform code followed a meeting between staff and management that was also attended by a New York Hotel Workers Union representative, according to The (London) Times. "There had been some complaints about the uniform," union spokesman John Turchiano told the newspaper.

Earlier this week, Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) called for legislation that would ensure maids were equipped with panic buttons. "Housekeepers at hotels have a right not to be sexually attacked," said Lancman. "We send hotel workers into rooms, by themselves, with no security."

Strauss-Kahn was moved Wednesday to a luxury Tribeca townhouse, where he will remain under house arrest.

NY Assemblyman Calls for Hotel Legislation

New York Daily News: New York's hotel maids would be fitted with panic buttons under a bill prompted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest on charges of attacking a Sofitel housekeeper.

The legislation, which Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) plans to introduce Monday, calls for maids to carry alarms with small buttons that look like key chains and can alert security to peril.

"Housekeepers at hotels have a right not to be sexually attacked," said Lancman Sunday outside the Sofitel on W. 44th St. "We send hotel workers into rooms. By themselves. With no security."

Lancman said the incident last Saturday, when a 32-year-old Sofitel maid told cops that the French fat cat forced her to perform oral sex and tried to rape her, inspired the bill. Housekeepers applauded the proposed law, saying predatory guests are common.

Workers at the Hilton New York on Sixth Ave. said a 19th-floor maid hid from a naked tourist Wednesday after he chased her screaming, "I need sex! I need sex!" as she tried to tidy up his room. "I just ran away and went into another room and locked the door," she told the Daily News.

"I told my supervisor. She came back to the room with me to clean it. I didn't want to be alone," she said. The woman said she didn't report it to hotel security because the man checked out later that day.

A Holiday Inn SoHo maid said she uses her supply cart to prop open the room door to feel safe. "There is no time to call security. There is no time to use the phone," she said. "You just have to run."

A housekeeper at the Millenium Hilton said she once caught a male guest masturbating and now eyes the room's mirrors before going inside. "If there is a man in the room and he asks for service, I put my vacuum in the door. I never ever close the door. Ever," she said.

Hotel Housekeepers Often Wary of Job

Washington Post: Hotel housekeepers say they often feel a twinge of fear when they slide the key card, turn the door handle and step into a room to clean it. What will they find?

For Argelia Rico, it was a naked man who touched himself as he ogled her. For Kimberly Phillips, it was a pair of dogs that tore into her leg.

Last week the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was charged with chasing a housekeeper around his $3,000-a-night penthouse suite and forcing her to perform oral sex on him at the Sofitel hotel in New York. Labor groups and hotel housekeepers have reported at least 10 other such incidents in the United States in recent years, from Gaithersburg to remote Grand Island, Neb.

Many more are hushed up, labor groups say, because the victims are illegal immigrants or because hotels are wary of scaring off guests. Many hotels laid off security staff during the recession, leaving workers even more vulnerable, they said. “It’s dangerous work,” said Yazmin Vazquez, who works at a hotel in downtown Chicago. “These customers think they can use us for anything they want, because we don’t have the power that they have or the money that they have.”

Workers’ accounts
Anthony Roman, a consultant based on New York’s Long Island who spent 30 years working security for hotels, said he knows of dozens of incidents involving female room attendants, from drunken propositions to rape. “They’re not an infrequent occurrence,” he said. Hotels try to make sure housekeepers are not alone for their whole shift, Roman said, but “if you have a sexual predator by nature, all bets are off.”

At the luxury hotel in Toronto where Andria Babbington worked for 17 years, housekeepers especially hated doing “turndown” service, which involves preparing beds for the night. Some men would put money on the pillow, ask for sexual favors and tell the women they could take the money when they left, Babbington said.

Others took a more circuitous route to the same end. They would inquire about a housekeeper’s home country and how many family members they were supporting. Then came some sympathetic-sounding questions about how much the hotel paid them, followed by an offer of money for sex.

One guest bugged Babbington for days about having a threesome with his wife. She hid her name tag whenever she cleaned his room. If a housekeeper reacted angrily, the guest would find some reason to raise a stink, she said.

“When they complained, the management would send a fruit basket up to their room and offer them a discount on their next stay,” Babbington said. “It became the norm, and we couldn’t do anything about it.” Now a union organizer, the 45-year-old Babbington said she hears similar stories from workers at other hotels.

Rico, a 38-year-old housekeeper at a hotel in Irvine, Calif., said she was cleaning a bathroom in 2009 when a guest entered and asked her to change his sheets. She did, then went to get her cleaning supplies out of the bathroom. When she came out he was lying naked on the bed, watching her and touching himself, she said. “When I told my supervisors, they didn’t do anything,” Rico said. “From then on I had to ask a co-worker from the floor upstairs to accompany me so I could clean his room, because that really scared me.”

Phillips was cleaning rooms at a Hampton Inn in Lebanon, Ky., last year when she opened the door of Room 118 to find two dogs. The animals attacked her left leg, biting through to the bone, until a hotel guest fought them off with Phillips’s broom.

The dogs belonged to a contractor who was staying at the hotel while doing work there. Phillips, 40, now uses a cane and walks with a limp. She has nerve damage in her leg and suffers from panic attacks. “It’s completely changed my whole life,” she said. “Even to sit outside, I can’t do that. I’m afraid a dog is going to approach me.”

The Hampton Inn’s manager, Becky Edlin, said the hotel had tightened its security measures after the attack. She declined to elaborate.

Many hotels have adopted policies aimed at protecting housekeepers, such as barring them from cleaning rooms while they are occupied. One standard practice is to prop the open door with a supply cart.

Vazquez, 40, said she started wearing extra clothes under her uniform as an added layer of protection after a VIP guest barged into a bathroom she was cleaning and pulled out his privates in August. She also wears a jacket that comes down to her thighs. “Anything to hide your figure,” she said.

Protective measures
Some hotels will send only male employees to a room late at night if their computers show a guest is watching pornography, said Carl Boger, dean of academics at the University of Houston’s college of hotel management. They can also monitor who opens a door and when by looking at the electronic lock system, he said. In the New York case, those records should help investigators determine the timeline of the alleged attack and whether the housekeeper had propped the door open, Boger said.

The Sofitel’s open-door security policy was in place before Strauss-Kahn was charged in the alleged May 14 attack. Sofitel officials say they are not aware of any other such incidents involving maids at any of their worldwide hotels.

The 32-year-old maid, an immigrant from Guinea who worked for the Sofitel for three years, told police that a naked Strauss-Kahn accosted her after she came into the room, attacking her in the bedroom and bathroom before she got away. Strauss-Kahn was indicted on multiple charges, including attempted rape and sexual abuse. He posted $1 million cash bail and a $5 million insurance bond and is under house arrest in Manhattan.

Labor groups worry that the recession has created more danger by forcing hotels to cut back on security guards and housekeepers. “You’re on a floor by yourself, with those long hallways and nobody around, cleaning 30 rooms a day alone,” said Tho Do, a vice president of Unite Here, a union representing hotel workers. “You don’t have a lot of protection.”

Sofitel Incident Spotlights Housekeeper Security

USA Today: The arrest of International Monetary Fund's Dominique Strauss-Kahn for allegedly trying to rape a housekeeper in a New York City luxury hotel suite is putting the spotlight on hotel security - especially for housekeepers.

"It has sparked quite a lot of questions on the topic of security in hotels," says Leigh Shelton, a spokeswoman for hotel workers' union, Unite Here.

The Toronto Star spoke with a former housekeeper who said that housekeepers tend to be vulnerable since they may be immigrant women who may fear for their jobs.

Some housekeepers are reluctant to report cases such as inappropriate touching or groping because hotel management conveys an attitude of "the guest is always right," Andria Babbington, who worked 17 years as a housekeeper, told the Star. Babbington is now a Unite Here union rep.

For many women who face harassment from hotel guests, the question is, "Do I complain? I could lose my job," she said. She's heard her share of stories during her housekeeping days.

"You would hear 'Come in.' And then you walk in and the guest has no clothes on, in his birthday suit," she said. "He would say, 'Can you touch me here? Or can you tuck me in?' I would say, 'My job is done' and I'd walk away," said Babbington, who now works as a health and safety representative for Local 75 of Unite Here.

The unidentified housekeeper at the heart of the Strauss-Kahn case is an African immigrant and widow with a 15-year-old daughter, her lawyer, Jeffrey Shapiro, told MSNBC. She is not a U.S. citizen but is in the USA on a visa.

She had told authorities that she thought the room was empty when she knocked on the door and walked into now-infamous room 2806 at the luxury Sofitel hotel. She said a man emerged from the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway, pulled her into a bedroom and dragged her into a bathroom before allegedly leaving the hotel to catch an Air France flight back to France.

Not much is known about the housekeeper, but CNN reports that she is from Guinea. She picked Strauss-Kahn out of a police lineup, and is ready to testify before a grand jury or take other necessary steps, Shapiro told CNN.

California Considers Hotel Fitted Sheet Requirement

Fox News: Fitted or flat?

That’s the weighty question facing the California Legislature, which is considering a bill that would regulate what type of sheets can be used on hotel bed mattresses across the state.

Supporters of the bill argue it will reduce worker injuries by eliminating the need for workers to repetitively lift extremely heavy mattresses when making beds. They contend that flat sheets cause workers to strain their backs, shoulders and wrists, and are often responsible for repetitive motion injuries.

State Bill 432, sponsored by Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), also calls for the use of long-handled tools like mops and dusters so housekeepers do not have to get down on their hands and knees to clean bathroom floors. “Just by using fitted sheets you could cut the number of lifts in half, and we think that would go a long way in preventing worker injury,” said Leigh Shelton, a spokesperson for UNITE HERE, a union that represents California hospitality workers.

But the California Hotel and Lodging Association says replacing existing sheets to comply with the bill could cost between $30 million and $50 million. “At a time when California’s looking at over a $26 billion budget, you would kind of think that the legislature had other things to worry about,” said Randi Knott, of the California Hotel and Lodging Association.

Hotel operators argue they will need to purchase new equipment in order to launder the fitted sheets. They also say fitted sheets will have to be replaced more often, that the elastic in fitted sheets breaks down faster than fabric, and that fitted sheets cost more to iron, fold and store. And Knott says hotel owners already offer the long-handled mops and dusters to cleaners, but aren't used.

The hotel association doubts that a sheet change would significantly decrease workers injuries, and say if it was, such a widespread problem the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration would be involved. "If there was a regulatory system through OSHA that handles issues related to workers injuries, and if this is as much of a problem as the proponents of the bill are saying it is, I believe OSHA would have been involved a long time ago,” said Knott.

Others argue California's elected leaders should be addressing more pressing problems in the state -- like balancing the budget. And even if the bill is passed, Knott says, it will be too difficult to effectively enforce. “When you think about enforcement at the local level, I’d like to know how the state plans on enforcing it in the 550,000 hotel rooms. It’s a bit unwieldy.”

That’s one issue the Senate Appropriations Committee is attempting to figure out, as it tries to determine the possible fiscal impact the bill has on the state. “There is still some uncertainty with the bill dealing with the issue of enforcement. And we’re not sure if this is a question of a complaint-driven process, or whether this is handled as part of typical or ongoing inspections that are done,” said Bob Franzoia, staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

But the hotel workers union say that they'll continue to push for reform, especially after a study that they commissioned concluded there was a higher injury rate among hotel housekeepers when compared to most other service workers. The bill is currently on a suspense file until the end of the month, at which time the committee will bring the issue back up in hearing. It is expected to reach the Senate floor by the end of May.