Housekeeping Dick Flash

Housekeeping Dick Flash
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Low-wage workers have been fighting sexual harassment for years. The national conversation is finally catching up with them.
Nov. 18, 2017, 08:01 AM EST | Updated Nov. 20, 2017
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
- Nereyda Soto, restaurant worker in Long Beach, Calif., who was harassed by a guest
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Cecilia was working as a minibar attendant at a Chicago hotel when she knocked on the guest’s door and announced herself. The man’s response was quick and unequivocal: “You can come in.”
When she opened the door, “He was at the computer, masturbating,” Cecilia recalled. She was overcome with shock and embarrassment. Judging from the satisfied look on the man’s face, that was the whole idea.
“I felt nasty,” recalled Cecilia, who asked that her last name and the hotel not be identified. “You’d expect that to happen to people in a jail but not in regular work. I felt like crying.”
It wasn’t the only time Cecilia had dealt with extreme forms of sexual harassment in her three decades 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 housekeeper to the hotel’s security team to report the incident.
Since the allegations against movie producer Harvey Weinstein were first revealed last month, more and more women have stepped forward with stories of sexual harassment and assault at work. Their bravery in speaking out has toppled powerful men’s careers in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Washington. But much less attention has been paid to the rampant harassment in blue-collar workplaces, particularly the hotel industry.
Many of the stories that have hit front pages ― Weinstein, journalist Mark Halperin , comedian Louis C.K. ― center on powerful men who preyed on underlings or colleagues in hotel rooms ― a trend that would surprise no woman who’s ever worked as a housekeeper. If famous A-list actresses must deal with unwanted advances in the privacy of a hotel suite, imagine the vulnerability of an immigrant woman cleaning the room alone, for close to minimum wage, plus tips.
“Frankly, I don’t think much of the public understands what housekeepers go through just to clean these rooms and carry out the work,” said Maria Elena Durazo, a labor leader with the hospitality union Unite Here.
For several years Durazo’s union has advocated for housekeepers to be given handheld, wireless panic buttons that can alert hotel security when a worker feels threatened ― a sign of how dire it views the problem of sexual predation in the hotel industry. After working to negotiate the use of panic buttons in their employer contracts, the union is now lobbying city councils to mandate them through legislation so that all workers have access to them, union and non-union alike.
“The customer is always right in this industry... I just let it go.”
But, according to Durazo, the panic buttons only go so far in addressing the more fundamental problem: an imbalance of economic power between perpetrators and their victims, especially when the victims are working in or near poverty. “We have to do something to equalize the power so that women really have the ability to speak up, without having to risk their livelihood,” she said. “That goes for whether you’re a housekeeper or a food server or a big-time actor.”
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.
Nereyda Soto, 25, was working in a hotel restaurant in Long Beach, Calif., two years ago when a guest’s attention over several days started to feel like stalking. The man repeatedly called Soto over to his table whenever he dined in the restaurant, asking her personal questions, such as whether she had a boyfriend. Relatively new to the job at the time, Soto didn’t feel comfortable telling a paying guest to buzz off.
When Soto came by his table to collect the man’s check one night, she found a hotel key card along with his payment. “He said, ‘I’d love to see how you look outside this uniform. You should meet me in my room.’”
Soto was mortified, but she didn’t tell her boss at the time.
“I didn’t tell management, and I didn’t tell security, because he didn’t technically touch me and the customer is always right in this industry,” Soto explained. Even if she did report it, she didn’t expect her company would do anything about it, and she didn’t want to come off as a troublemaker: “I didn’t want my name to be out there. So I just let it go.”
The experience got Soto involved in a campaign in Long Beach to bring panic buttons to the city’s hotel workers. Led by labor groups, the idea of outfitting housekeepers with a way to alert hotel security started to catch on in 2011, after French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of assaulting a housekeeper at a New York hotel. The following year, the New York Hotel Trades Council won a contract for 30,000 workers that guaranteed the use of panic buttons for housekeepers covered under the agreement.
“I don’t think much of the public understands what housekeepers go through just to clean these rooms.”
In Long Beach, Soto’s union took a different tack: They tried to win the panic buttons through legislation so that the protections would be extended to all of the city’s hotel workers, not just those covered by a union contract. The local chamber of commerce campaigned against the regulation, estimating that compliance would collectively cost affected hotels about $3 million. After a yearlong effort, the Long Beach City Council narrowly rejected the panic button proposal in a 5-4 vote in September.
A similar panic button measure Unite Here pushed in Chicago recently fared much better. 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.
Unlike the union contract workers secured in New York, the Chicago ordinance will apply to hotels citywide, regardless of whether workers are in a union. A similar ordinance was passed last year in Seattle.
The Chicago campaign probably got a boost from the findings of its member survey on harassment, which Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said he found “astonishing.” Ramirez said the city’s hotel lobby didn’t actively fight the measure. The new national conversation about sexual harassment at work will make it harder to do so, he predicted.
“We didn’t see them out there with pompoms, but they didn’t speak out against it, either,” Ramirez said. “I think the industry would have a hard time opposing this, especially with everything that’s come to light in the last few months.”
The housekeepers wore “No Harveys in Chicago” T-shirts to mark the ordinance’s passage. Among those celebrating was Cecilia, who had spent months rallying her colleagues around the cause. She hopes the new panic 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.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said Chicago was the first city to pass panic button legislation. In fact, Seattle was.

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One woman has gone viral after sharing an unfortunate realization: she's accidentally been flashing her neighbors from her bathroom window. Viewers can't get enough of the hilarious clip, posted one week ago by TikToker Jill, also known as @mama_jill34: so far, the video, found here , has been viewed 8.5 million times and liked 1.4 million times.
In the clip, Jill realizes that, much to her alarm and dismay, she is the "naked window neighbor." This concept, of being the person in a given neighborhood who (accidentally or not) flashes their neighbors, is not a new one: the subject sparked a viral conversation late last year, after marketing strategist Molly Hale tweeted: "You either have a naked window neighbor or you are a naked window neighbor."
For Jill, the "naked window" in question is made of frosted glass and is located in a second-story master bathroom in her house, right next to the shower. "I felt like people could see me even through [its] frosted glass," said Jill in her video's on-screen text. "So I asked my husband to pretend he's showering so I could see."
The video was filmed at night, meaning the lit bathroom window stands out against the house's dark exterior. Sure enough, a silhouette appears at the window and begins to "shower." Jill's husband acts out different motions, all of which are highly visible from the outside—potentially bad news for anyone who actually showered in the bathroom.
His commitment to “fake showering” is impressive 💀
Luckily for Jill, she doesn't believe any neighbors have actually spotted her or her husband in the bathroom. "To our knowledge, no one has seen us," she told Newsweek .
"I definitely was not expecting it to reach so many people," she added. "I only had about 30 followers at the time of posting and I really just thought maybe a few people would get a kick out of it."
In response to viewers' requests, Jill posted a second video a few days later, this time showing a view of the bathroom window during the daytime. Alarmingly, the view inside the frosted glass window is somehow even more visible during the day. "That's really clear," said the TikToker.
Jill also showed how the window, while not located on the front of their house, actually overlooks the entire street due to the building's angle. "Most of my neighbors have a similar window, but the angle our house is placed on our lot makes ours much more prominent to the street," she added.
The second clip also reached a wide audience, amassing 1.5 million views of its own.
Across both videos, horrified viewers left thousands of comments, many of which expressed sympathy for the TikToker's unfortunate situation.
"Might as well be bathing on the front lawn," wrote @pineappiesauce.
"I'd never be able to look my neighbors in the eyes again," wrote @pineappiesauce.
Meanwhile, @ucandankme offered some more bad news: "Here's something horrifying, water usually makes it so you can see through frosted glass easier."
Instead of stressing, however, Jill appears to be taking advantage of the window as a potential source for entertainment and humor. "It's made for some other really funny videos," she said. "We think the whole situation is hilarious and we're having fun with follow-up videos."
"We aren't sure why it took off the way it did, but probably because a lot of people have a very similar window in their own home, or their neighborhood, and it hit home for them," she added. "Privacy glass isn't very private."
Updated 10/29/2021, 1:12 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with comments from TikTok user @mama_jill34.

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Occurred on August 22, 2018 / Clarksville, Arkansas, USA
Info from Licensor: "Driving down I-40 west bound in Arkansas and some crack heads started flashing us. They ran with us for about 80 miles showing us butt and their breasts."
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