Hotel room cleaning is a job that comes with risks

Today’s post comes to us from our colleague Edgar Romano at Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano, LLP in New York.

Hotels can be a dangerous place to work. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, of all service industry workers’, hotel workers’ have the highest rate of injury at 5%. The average for all service industries is only about 3.4%.

Hotel room cleaners have significantly higher injury rates than other hotel workers’, with nearly 8% experiencing injuries, according to a 2009 report in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine (as reported by the L.A. Times). This compares to 2.8% for banquet servers and just under 6% for cooks.

Nearly 1.8 million people worked in the travel and accommodations field in the United States in 2009, including more than 400,000 hotel room cleaners – most of them women.

This begs the question, why is hotel room cleaning a dangerous job? While the question may call to mind the allegations in the Dominique Strauss Khan case, potential assault is not one of the primary risks that hotel room cleaners face. To learn why hotel house cleaners are at risk for injury, check back in with us next week.

Edgar Romano is a Senior Partner in the Workers’ Compensation Department at Pasternack Tilker Ziegler Walsh Stanton & Romano, LLP in New York where he is actively engaged in litigating workers’ compensation claims. He has lectured extensively to labor unions and medical providers. Edgar is President of the Workers Injury Law and Advocacy Group and is on the Board of Directors of the New York State Workers’ Compensation Bar Association. He is a member of the Leader’s Forum of the American Association of Justice and Vice-President of the Workers’ Compensation Section. Mr. Romano serves on the Advisory Committee of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program at Mt. Sinai Hospital. He is listed in “Who’s Who in American Law” and was selected as a Super Lawyer for 2010 in the area of Workers Compensation by Super Lawyers magazine.