Hotel Room Cleaners Suffering On The Job
Study report that was released by four universities in America showed that there was a lot of suffering of hotel cleaners in the country. It found out that most of these workers were emigrants women who could not get any other job due to lack of any formal training. Most of these cleaners are not members of any organized union leaving them at the mercy of the employers. The other thing that affects these cleaners is that most of them have no good insurance cover which makes them suffer incase of physical accidents (Keung, 2009).
Hotel house cleaners are the most prone to injuries among the hotel workers this is because of the type of job which they do and the type of the work environment they operate. The house keepers’ job is physical and involves carrying of heavy mattresses to different floors, moving supplies to various points at the hotel, vacuuming carpets, and changing the sheets. The kind of job that they do is intense and manual such that by the end of working shift they are left weak and suffering. This job leaves most of the hotel room cleaners suffering from body parts like shoulder and backs. The physical pain suffered by the cleaners has made most of them to be on painkillers each day.
The study has shown that most of these hotel cleaners are not unionized which has made them to have a weak bargaining power. This has made most hotel room cleaners to have heavy work load and risky working conditions. Their working conditions are complex and risky which has made the number of injuries to be very high to this group of workers.
The extent of suffering has been aggravated by the complexity of the modern hotel rooms. The workers now complain that the mattresses being used these days in the hotel rooms are too heavy and the hygiene standards required in these hotels has gone high. These factors have made their work to be hard and tedious. Most of these workers do their duties rapidly without thinking of the dangers involved in their nature of work (Wernau, 2009).
Some of the hotel room cleaners are old women who don’t have an alternative but to continue working to earn a living. These old ladies are also required to do all these tasks of pushing heavy carts just like their younger counterparts. This has added the suffering and has added to the nature of injuries these women suffer. Some of hotel worker suffers permanent body injuries which makes them unable to work again.
The turnover rates of hotel cleaners are high and most of the hotel room cleaners work as casuals. These groups of workers are the poorest paid and over worked in the hotel industry. Due to the job insecurity most of them don’t report injuries leaving them to suffer in silence. The policy makers need to address the plight of hotel room cleaners. They should push for improvement of the terms of employment, and also put a requirement for improvement of their working environment. They should be provided with a good insurance cover by their employees. The hotel room cleaners deserve a better treatment as they provide comfort to the guest who visits the hotel rooms.
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