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November,
1999
Pioneering
Hotel Workers Study
Gets Results
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A
new study of the health and working conditions of room
cleaners in four major San Francisco hotels has helped
reduce the number of rooms that workers must clean each
day. The study was co-directed by Niklas Krause, M.D.,
senior research scientist for COEH at UC Berkeley's School
of Public Health, and Pam Tau Lee of LOHP.
In
the wake of the study, a workload reduction was negotiated
in a new contract between Hotel Employees and Restaurant
Employees (HERE) Local 2 and the hotels in the summer of
1999.
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NEW!
The Journal
of Public Health Policy (vol. 23 no. 3, Autumn
2002) recently featured an article by Pam Tau Lee
and Niklas Krause on the San Francisco hotel workers'
project. Click
here to read the article (in Adobe Acrobat PDF
format).
Article
reproduced courtesy of the authors.
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The
research indicated that the physical workload of the room
cleaners has increased over the past five years and their
health is worse than the general U.S. population. It also
found that more than three-quarters of the 258 workers
surveyed experienced work-related pain in the last year.
About one-third of the workers reported high levels of
job stress. The findings also suggested that changes can
be made in the structure and organization of hotel work
to reduce room cleaners' health risks and stress.
The
fast-growing hospitality industry is a major employer of
low-wage service workers in U.S. metropolitan areas. As competition
for global tourism and convention business has increased,
the $75 billion industry has added beds, services, and amenities,
while cutting costs through leaner staffing and higher performance
demands on workers. The study, which was commissioned by
Local 2 with additional funding from the Rockefeller Foundation,
explored the impact of these changes on hotel room cleaners—the
largest occupational group within the industry. |
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"Room
cleaning jobs in the hospitality industry are characterized by increasing
repetitive physical workloads, low income, low skill utilization,
low job control, and virtually no prospects for training and career
advancement," the researchers reported. "There is compelling
evidence that such low-income jobs result in a disproportionately
high burden of illness, injury, and disability."
Breaking New Ground
No
other scientific studies of the hospitality workforce have ever
been made. Recognizing that they were breaking new ground, Krause,
Lee, and their colleagues emphasized collaboration with the room
cleaners themselves throughout the study.
Nearly
70 percent of the eligible room cleaners participated in the study,
volunteering their time outside of work to take a survey (available
in several languages). A core group of room cleaners participated
in focus groups and helped the researchers develop the survey and
interpret the results.
Nearly
the entire survey population (99 percent) was female. Most (95 percent)
were immigrants who speak a native language other than English (including
Spanish, Tagalog, and Chinese). Nearly half (44 percent) were over
age 50.
Work More Demanding
For most of the room cleaners, the number of rooms to be cleaned
per day over the past five years had not changed, yet 87 percent
reported that their job has become more demanding. Participants
attributed this to upgrading of facilities (for example, larger
beds and heavier bedspreads), added amenities in the rooms such
as coffee makers, more people per room, heavier equipment like the
carts, and hotel guests who now bring more food into the rooms and
leave more garbage.
For
more information about the project, contact Pam Tau Lee at LOHP.
Phone (510) 642-5507 or e-mail ptlee@berkeley.edu.
Adapted from Center for Occupational and
Environmental Health (COEH) Newsletter
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