U.S News

NEW YORK – Hotel housekeepers feature they often see a twinge of fear when they motion the keycard, turn the entranceway handle and travel into a shack to clean it. What module they find?

For Argelia Rico, it was a unclothed man who touched himself as he ogled her. For Kimberly Phillips, it was a pair of dogs that tore into her leg.

This week the former nous of the coercive International Monetary Fund, chicken Strauss-Kahn, was live with chasing a housekeeper around his $3,000 a night penthouse suite and forcing her to action oral stimulate on him at the Sofitel New royalty Hotel.

But fag groups and hotel housekeepers hit reported at least 10 another attacks in the U.S. in past years, from the Washington, D.C. community of Gaithersburg, Md., to far Grand Island, Neb.

Labor groups feature whatever more are quiet up because the victims are banned immigrants or because hotels are shy of scaring soured guests. Many hotels ordered soured section staff during the recession, leaving workers even more vulnerable, they said.

"It's chanceful work," said Yazmin Vazquez, who entireness at a hotel in downtown Chicago. "These customers think they crapper use us for anything they want because we don't hit the noesis that they hit or the money that they have."

Anthony Roman, a consultant supported on New York's Long Island who spent 30 eld employed section for hotels, said he saw mountain of incidents involving female shack attendants, from drunken propositions to rape.

"They're not an occasional occurrence," he said.

Roman said that patch hotels try to attain sure that housekeepers aren't lonely for their whole shift, "if you hit a sexed beast by nature, every bets are off."

At the wealth hotel in Toronto where Andria Babbington worked for 17 years, housekeepers especially hated doing "turn-down" service, which involves preparing beds for the night.

Some men would place money on the pillow, communicate for sexed favors and tell the women they could verify the money when they left, Babbington said.

Others took a more indirect line to the aforementioned end: they would communicate most a housekeeper's bag country and how whatever family members they were supporting. Then came whatever sympathetic-sounding questions most much the hotel paying them — followed by an substance of money for sex.

One temporary bugged Babbington for life most having a trinity with his wife. She hid her nametag whenever she cleaned his room. If a housekeeper reacted angrily, the temporary would encounter whatever reason to improve a stink, she said.

"When they complained the direction would beam a production basket up to their shack and substance them a reduction on their incoming stay," Babbington said. "It became the norm, and we couldn't do anything most it."

Now a organization organizer, the 45-year-old Babbington said she today hears kindred stories from workers at another hotels.

Rico, a 38-year-old housekeeper at a hotel in Irvine, Calif., said she was cleanup a shack in 2009 when a temporary entered and asked her to modify his sheets. She did, then went to get her cleanup supplies discover of the bathroom.

When she came discover he was lying unclothed on the bed, watching her and impinging himself, she said.

"When I told my supervisors, they didn't do anything," Rico said. "From then on I had to communicate a co-worker from the story upstair to accompany me so I could clean his room, because that rattling afeard me."

Phillips was cleanup flat at a jazzman Inn in Lebanon, Ky., last assemblage when she unsealed the entranceway of Room 118 to encounter two dogs. The animals attacked her mitt leg, biting through to the bone, until a hotel temporary fought them soured with Phillips' broom.

The dogs belonged to a fasciculus who was staying at the hotel patch doing impact there.

The 40-year-old Phillips today uses a cane and walks with a limp. She has nerve alteration in her handicap and suffers from fright attacks.

"It's completely denaturized my whole life," she said. "Even to set outside, I can't do that: I'm afeard a dog is feat to approach me."

The jazzman Inn's manager, Becky Edlin, said the hotel had tightened its section measures after the attack but declined to elaborate.

Many hotels hit adopted policies aimed at protecting housekeepers, much as exclusion them from cleanup flat patch they are occupied. One accepted training is to support the unstoppered entranceway with a supply cart.

Vazquez, 40, says she started wearing player clothes low her uniform as an additional place of endorsement after a VIP temporary barged into a shack she was cleanup and pulled discover his privates in August. She also wears a crown that comes downbound to her thighs.

"Anything to hide your figure," she said.

Some hotels module beam only phallic employees to a shack late at night if their computers exhibit a temporary is watching porn, said Carl Boger, dean of academics at the University of Houston's college of hotel management.

They crapper also guardian who opens a entranceway and when by looking at the electronic lock system, he said.

In the New royalty case, those records should support investigators watch the timeline of the questionable attack and if the housekeeper had propped the entranceway open, he said.

The open-door policy is a section procedure that's been in place at the Sofitel before Strauss-Kahn was live in the questionable May 14 attack. Sofitel officials feature they're not alive of any another incident of a sexed attack on a missy at any of their worldwide hotels.

The 32-year-old maid, an immigrant from the West individual commonwealth of Guinea who worked for the Sofitel for threesome years, told police that a unclothed Strauss-Kahn accosted her after she came into the room, offensive her in the bedroom and shack before she got away.

Strauss-Kahn was indicted on binary charges including attempted ravishment and sexed abuse; he posted $1 meg cash recognizance and a $5 meg insurance bond and is low house arrest in Manhattan.

Labor groups worry that the recession has created more danger by forcing hotels to revilement backwards on both section guards and housekeepers.

"You're on a story by yourself, with those daylong hallways and nobody around, cleanup 30 flat a period alone," said Tai Do, a vice president of UNITE HERE, a organization representing hotel workers. "You don't hit a aggregation of protection."

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Associated Press writers Leanne Italie and Verena Dobnik contributed to this report.

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