“Hotel housekeepers are exposed to serious occupational risks in the course of their normal work duties. Housekeeping duties include changing bed linen, scrubbing bathroom floors and fixtures, polishing, dusting, vacuuming, and pushing heavy linen carts. These tasks are frequently performed under great time pressure. The majority of housekeepers are women, people of color, and/or immigrants. These groups have been repeatedly identified as having excessive exposure to occupational risks…
Housekeepers suffer the highest injury rate among all classifications of hotel employees. They are more likely to suffer musculoskeletal disorders than all other hotel employees. They are injured at a rate far exceeding the average injury rate for employees in the service sector as a whole…
Serious and often disabling repetitive motion injuries are associated with changing linens on beds that now weigh in excess of 115 pounds on average."
(Excerpts from Petition for Promulgation of a Safety and Health Standard for the Protection of Hotel Housekeepers January 2012)
https://www.dir.ca.gov/oshsb/documents/Hotel-Housekeeping-Musculoskeletal-Injury-Prevention-dr1.pdf
It took Cal Osha 6 years to come up with a safety standard…
https://www.dir.ca.gov/oshsb/documents/Hotel-Housekeeping-Musculoskeletal-Injury-Prevention-proptxt.pdf
And employers want to complain about cumulative trauma?
