When you work in a hotel in North Carolina, you face a 40% higher injury rate than all others employed in the service sector. If you work in a hotel as a housekeeper, you are even more at risk of experiencing a severe, debilitating work-related injury, with hotel housekeepers suffering more injuries than any other professional in the industry.
According to UNITE HERE, hotel housekeeping involves hard physical labor. In your role, you may spend hours upon hours performing heavy lifting, scrubbing floors on your hands and knees or doing the same series of physical tasks repeatedly. All of these actions have the capacity to cause injuries, and many of the injuries suffered by hotel employees have a sizable impact on quality of life.
Hotel housekeeper injury statistics
Studies show that, as a hotel housekeeper, your injury rate is 7.9 injuries for every 100,000 workers employed full-time. This is twice as high as the injury rate in all other service-sector positions. Injury rates are even higher among Hispanic hotel housekeepers, who face a rate of 10.6 injuries for every 100,000 employed full-time. Also, two out of every three hotel housekeepers suffer on-the-job injuries that are serious enough to warrant them seeking medical care.
Hotel housekeeper injury prevention
Part of the problem compounding injury rates for hotel housekeepers is the fact that many hotels, motels and resorts currently lack adequate staffing. When there are not enough workers around to clean hotel rooms, the ones who do show up to work face an uphill battle – and their bodies feel the effects.
Many hotel housekeepers also say their employers encourage them to clean rooms at unsafe speeds exacerbating injury risks.