The Bee's June 24 editorial against Senate Bill 432 ("Two bills lawmakers shouldn't even touch") treats my daily struggles as a joke. But I can tell you the physical toll of cleaning thousands of hotel rooms year after year is not funny. I don't understand why The Bee would laugh at the burdens of those who lift heavy mattresses and clean bathrooms on our hands and knees. My knees have resembled those of an NFL player more than a middle-aged woman.
SB 432 would require hotels to provide fitted sheets and long-handled bathroom cleaning tools. The Bee says this legislation to reduce housekeeper back, knee and other injuries is a "waste" of the Legislature's time. Ouch! There are 550,000 hotel rooms in California, and more than 10,000 housekeepers. Most of us are women – mostly poor, women of color.
We work for luxury hotels; we don't have their money and power.
Studies found hotel housekeepers have higher injury rates than other hotel workers and the workforce generally. Hotel owners "dispute" the studies, without offering evidence. Does anyone really question that hotel housekeepers do difficult, dirty and injury-producing work? Just clean your own home every day, every week, every year – without a mop for the bathroom or fitted sheets.
You can't even buy a set of sheets for your own bed without a fitted bottom sheet. You wouldn't put up with the lifting and tucking, lifting and tucking, lifting and tucking.
The Legislature should step in when powerful interests injure the weak. Requiring fitted sheets and bathroom mops would prevent our injuries.
Would growers have given up the short-handled hoe, which required farmworkers to hoe bent over, without a law? Or accepted heat rules for farmworkers in sweltering summer fields without legislative action? No.
The editorial was silent about the bill's requirement for all hotels in California to provide long-handled bathroom cleaning tools – because the industry has no answer to this and gave The Bee no objection. Yet, if the Legislature followed The Bee's call to kill our bill, many housekeepers would be kept on our hands and knees.
SB 432 would help us get up off our knees and straighten our backs.
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Jenny Amaya has been a hotel housekeeper in Sacramento for 10 years.
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