Claudia’s Law Aimed At Ending Inhumane Workloads, Harassment Of Long Beach Hotel Workers
Faced with monumental workloads and frequent sexual harassment in the workplace, hotel workers and their allies in Long Beach, California are pushing for a measure which would address several workplace issues in the city’s booming hotel industry. Activists launched a campaign this week to advance the measure, dubbed “Claudia’s Law”. Tonia Reyes Uranga is on the steering-committee of the Coalition for Good Jobs and Healthy Community:
[Tonia Reyes Uranga]: “Claudia Sanchez was a dish washer at the Renaissance Hotel. She was, I think, at that time, only nineteen years old. After a fourteen-hour shift, she collapsed. She had some heavy workloads all through her time at the Renaissance and…she was in a coma, she was rushed to the hospital…and consequently she’s going to need some assistance and support for the rest of her life.”
Long Beach is a tourist city located between Disneyland and Downtown Los Angeles. Reyes Uranga says the hotel industry has been growing rapidly over the last sixteen years while the number of workers per hotel has dropped:
[Tonia Reyes Uranga]: “Really what that means is we have workers who are having increased workloads, leaving them exhausted and often results in them having to work through their legal breaks in order to meet their room quotas. Especially the housekeepers, who sometimes have to work overtime or come in early just to meet those quotas. We have this boom in hotels, but yet it’s on the backs of the workers, and it’s just leaving them exhausted and often times, in the case of Claudia, it’s leaving them affected for the rest of their lives. You know, they’re breaking them. They’re breaking them, and they need support.”
http://www.laborradio.org/index.cfm?zone=/unionactive/view_article.cfm&HomeID=616963&page=In2DDepth20Reports
