Low-wage workers have been fighting sexual harassment for years. Cecilia tells her story and opens up about what she’s faced, working at a hotel.

Cecilia was working as a minibar attendant when she knocked on the guest’s door and announced herself. The man’s response was quick: “You can come in.” When she opened the door, “He was at the computer, masturbating,” Cecilia recalled. She was shocked and embarrassed.

She assumed that was the plan from the jump, judging from the look on his face. “I felt nasty,” she said. “You’d expect that to happen to people in a jail but not in regular work. I felt like crying.”

However, this wasn’t the only time Cecilia had dealt with extreme forms of sexual harassment in her long career in working in downtown hotels. A male guest once answered her knock by opening the door naked. Just a month and a half ago, a younger colleague confided to Cecilia that a male guest had tried to embrace her while she was in his room. Cecilia escorted the shaken and disturbed housekeeper to the hotel’s security team to report the incident.

Last year, Unite Here surveyed roughly 500 of its Chicago area members who work in hotels and casinos as housekeepers and servers, many of them Latino and Asian immigrants. The results were disturbing:
* 58 percent of hotel workers and 77 percent of casino workers said they had been sexually harassed by a guest.
* 49 percent of hotel workers said they had experienced a guest answering the door naked or otherwise exposing himself.
* 56 percent of hotel workers who’d reported harassment said they didn’t feel safe on the job afterward.
* 65 percent of casino cocktail servers said a guest had touched or tried to touch them without permission.
* Nearly 40 percent of casino workers said they’d been pressured for a date or a sexual favor.

The City Council passed a “Hands Off, Pants On” ordinance last month, which requires hotels to outfit housekeepers and others who work alone in guest rooms or bathrooms with panic buttons by July 1, 2018. It also requires hotels to develop sexual harassment policies that show workers how to report incidents and provide them with time to file complaints with the police.

Cecilia, who had spent months rallying her colleagues around the cause, is excited about the new panic buttons. She hopes the buttons will bring a sense of safety to workers like the young housekeeper she helped not even two months ago. “It’s more security, and more support,” Cecilia said. “Trust me. You shouldn’t be scared to work.”

Source: huffingtonpost.com