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When Tricia Bahen was 17, she got a job at a popular resort as a maid (and sometimes waitress). She planned to make some money for university at a fun summer job. What she wasn’t expecting was the gruelling 12-hour days, the crowded shared worker lodging and the barely edible food her employer served the workers.
“We were completely overworked,” says Bahen (who is now a teacher). “By the end of the summer, I was ready to leave and never come back.” Unfortunately, that was impossible if she wanted to get paid. “The resort held back our pay unless we returned to work Thanksgiving weekend.”
Her duties as a housekeeper were hard on her body: cleaning bathrooms, scrubbing floors, doing endless laundry, changing sheets and often finding rooms left in a filthy state by guests. Bahen credits this work with the fatigue and repetitive strain injuries she felt during that summer.
While not every hotel job requires workers to live on-site, each job at a hotel has health and safety risks that are important to be aware of. These are the most common risks, and the steps your child should take to stay safe.
Physical hazards for housekeeping staff
The housekeeping team is essential to a hotel’s reputation and success. Cleanliness matters! However, their efforts are often underappreciated, which can take a psychological toll on workers.
According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, common risk factors for housekeepers include:
- repetitive motion injuries
- exposure to chemicals in cleaning products
- exposure to infectious diseases from soiled linens, uncapped needles or bodily fluids
- slips, trips and falls
- fatigue from shift work or long hours
These risks can (and should) be mitigated with fair scheduling, rotating of tasks, WHMIS training, ergonomics training, personal protective equipment (PPE) and the appropriate breaks. If you discover that your teen hasn’t been provided with these precautions, that’s a red flag and needs to be addressed with a supervisor.
Violence and harassment for hotel workers dealing with guests
Housekeepers, particularly females (who make up the majority of people employed in this position) are also subject to harassment, especially if they are working alone.
A paper in the journal Gender, Work & Organization interviewed female hotel workers employed by 5-star hotels in Queensland, Australia. Of the 46 women who participated in the study, 44 had experienced harassment or assault from male guests.
Violence and harassment are also a top safety concern in customer service jobs. At a hotel lobby or front desk this is a primary safety risk for workers who may be dealing with angry guests.
Every employer in Ontario is required to have a Workplace Violence and Harassment Policy and program and take every reasonable precaution to keep their workers safe. If your teen has no idea that this policy exists, that is a problem that must be addressed with their supervisor. Your teen should know the protocols and feel safe at work.
Risks for hotel maintenance workers
While front-facing hotel staff and housekeepers face numerous physical and psychological health and safety risks in their jobs, maintenance workers perform some of the most hazardous physical tasks overall: Working at heights and using power tools and machines, which are two of the most common ways that Ontario workers get injured or killed on the job.
Mandatory Working at Heights training is a prerequisite for workers on construction projects (including in hotels) and anyone who will be working at any height above three metres (or 10 feet). Any worker who will be using power tools or machinery as part of their job should also receive training about how to safely use this equipment.
Make sure your teen is aware of workers’ safety rights
Bahen wishes she had all the details of the job before she took it. “If I had known about the long hours without breaks, and just how physically demanding it would be, I would have at least been prepared,” she says.
Luckily, the right to know exists. This Ontario law says that once workers have been hired, they must be given all the details of the health and safety hazards of their job before they are ever expected to do it. Find out more about the right to know in this post.