Team Project Summaries from 2004-7

1. Investigating Janitorial Chemical Hazards: "So Safe You Can Eat It"  
2. Overhead Drilling in the Construction Trades
3. Summertime Blues: Heat Stress in a Fabric-coating Factory
4. Heavenly Beds, Backbreaking Work: Hotel Room Cleaners
5. Day Laborers in Los Angeles  Survey of Hazards
6. Bricklayer Exposure to Silica Dust
7. Heat Illness among California Farmworkers
8. Chinese Restaurant Worker Hazards
9. New York Public Employees Federation (PEF) Violence Prevention Project
10. Health and Safety at Work: Immigrant Retail Workers in Brooklyn

Heavenly Beds, Backbreaking Work: Hotel Room Cleaners

Sponsors and Mentors

• UNITE HERE Local 11 and the national union's health and safety staff UNITE (formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees) and HERE (Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union) merged in 2004 to form the new union UNITE HERE.
• UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH) with assistance from the UCLA Labor Studies Center

Hotel housekeeping is physically demanding work, made more difficult in recent years by understaffing, cost-cutting measures, added amenities in rooms, poorly maintained or inadequate equipment, and increased work pace.  Most housekeepers in Los Angeles are female Latina immigrants; many are single parents. 

UNITE HERE, the union representing these workers, has initiated a national effort to address the reported increase in work-related injuries among hotel housekeepers.  OHIP interns helped UNITE HERE learn more about the types and causes of common work-related injuries and illnesses through interviews, workshops, and hotel visits.  Both team members were fluent in Spanish – one from the UCLA Community Health Sciences Program in the School of Public Health, and an undergraduate majoring in Chicano/a Studies with a minor in Labor and Workplace Studies. 

The interns found that many work-related injuries are not reported. Barriers to reporting that they identified included fear of losing paid hours or being fired, “reward” programs that discourage reporting, distrust of company doctors, and poor relations with management.  Often, workers continue to work through pain because disability pay is insufficient or because they are ineligible to receive these benefits due to immigration status.

In their report, the students noted, “We agree with OHIP’s emphasis on spending time with workers. We learned a great deal from our interactions, both formal and informal, with hotel housekeepers.”  One of them later elaborated, “The internship was a really positive experience, especially talking to workers. I never learned anything before about participatory action research. My previous experience with research is that it’s boring, that it’s all based on reading books. I didn’t know people who value this kind of research – like understanding the experiences of workers.”  The other intern reflected, “I have a personal goal – to write all of my friends and family about hotel workers so they think about the workers who clean their rooms when they stay in a hotel.”

One of the students, upon completing her Masters in Community Health Sciences, was hired by the UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program (LOSH), where she worked for two years before starting law school in fall 2007.