“We want safety for all the workers,” Geoconda Argüello-Kline, the union’s secretary-treasurer, told AP. “We want to have some language in the contract to protect more the people who work inside the hotels.”

“We know what’s going on with sexual harassment. No woman should have to go through that.”

A recent survey in the UK found that sexual harassment is “rampant” in the hospitality industry, with nine out of ten workers “experiencing abuse” at work. Nearly 85% of respondents had witnessed harassment of someone else.

“Time and time again women – and men – are telling us that sexual harassment is just seen as part of their job,” Charlotte Bence, a hospitality coordinator for Unite, told The Guardian. “Standards of behaviour can slip when people don’t feel there is a need to be professional and people treat staff in bars, clubs and hotels in ways they wouldn’t dream of doing so in other environments.

And in a 2017 report from NPR, Karen Kent, president of the Chicago chapter of the hospitality workers union Unite Here, said that hotel workers are “especially vulnerable”.

“Our mission is to welcome people to the city and make them feel at home,” she said. “Hotel housekeepers work alone, cleaning rooms. And oftentimes, there’s a power imbalance between the women who clean them, who are often women of colour, immigrants, and guests who have those rooms who pay hundreds of dollars a night.

“If something happens with the guests, they often can’t be heard or possibly can’t even get away.”

In a study conducted by the union, 49% of hotel housekeepers had “found a guest naked or had answered the door naked or exposed themselves while they were cleaning the room”; 63% had “experienced an incident of sexual harassment on the job”.

Images: iStock

Hotel workers ask for panic buttons to protect them from sexual assault