Housekeepers Won’t Let Hyatt Sweep Safety Record Under the Rug (quarterly profits that jumped 600%)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6688/housekeepers_wont_let_hyatt_sweep_safety_record_under_the_rug/

Saturday Nov 20, 2010 9:30 pm

By Carl Finamore


Housekeepers demand small but crucial safety improvements from Hyatt management in Chicago. (Photo courtesy of UNITE-HERE)


The Hyatt Corporation just posted quarterly profits that jumped six hundred percent with their stock prices climbing at around the same rate. Along with this jumping and climbing, the corporation has taken up running, as in running away from the worst safety record in the industry.

Hyatt ranks last in workplace injuries suffered by its housekeeping staff according to UNITE-HERE, the union representing over 100,000 workers in more than 900 hotels in North America. The union is not alone. It cites a peer-reviewed academic study published by the American Journal of Industrial Medicine that places Hyatt dead last among the 50 hotels studied.

The abysmal record prompted Hyatt housekeepers at twelve hotels in eight different cities to simultaneously file injury complaints a few weeks ago with the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA). The union cites public records submitted by the hotels that indicate a 50 percent higher injury rate than the rest of industry.

For example, OSHA logs recorded 750 injuries at these 12 Hyatt properties between 2007-2009. Here’s why, according to the union: “At some Hyatt hotels, room attendants clean as many as 30 rooms a day, nearly double what is commonly required in the industry. This workload leaves room attendants as little as 15 minutes to clean a room—that’s 15 minutes to make beds, scrub and clean the toilet bowl, bathtub and all bathroom surfaces, dust, vacuum, empty the trash, change linens—among other things."

Thus, it is with some pride that the union describes the synchronized filing of OSHA complaints as a first in the private sector. It certainly will put a bigger spotlight on safety issues which are often ignored or pushed aside until a big catastrophe occurs.

But most work injuries do not occur through the better-publicized dramatic emergencies that periodically occur. In fact, most injuries at work occur through the dull, boring and routine repetitive motion performed each day of each week and of each month.

All this work is made worse when you are required to do it quickly.

FULL story at link.