Hotels and motels are homes away from home for business travelers and vacationers, offering both temporary lodging and relief from housekeeping chores back home. In attending to their guests and guestrooms, this Nation's hotels and motels employ about 1-1/2 million workers, most of them either preparing and serving food or cleaning rooms and otherwise maintaining grounds and premises. Working round-the-clock shifts, hotel staff face a variety of safety and health risks, such as disabling falls on slippery floors; bums from preparing hot food or using caustic laundry and cleaning compounds; and sprains from handling furniture and other heavy objects.
This article examines the injury and illness experience of hotel and motel workers from 2002 to 2002. Besides hotels and motels, the industry includes ski lodges and resorts, tourist cabins, and inns (such as bed and breakfast places).(1) The hotel study is part of a Bureau of Labor Statistics series focusing on "high impact" industries, which are defined as industries with the largest numbers of occupational injuries and illnesses, although not necessarily the highest incidence rates.
According to a 2002 BLS survey, the hotel industry was one of nine industries reporting at least 100,000 injury and illness cases that year. These industries, however, accounted for three-tenths of the 6.3 million cases reported nationwide in 2002. Clearly, steady declines in the number and frequency of injury and illness cases would require safer working conditions and work practices in high-impact and high-rate industries.
The simple but powerful idea that hotel training and management solutions form the constraints that shape human interaction has had a dramatic impact on economics and political science and is gaining influence in sociology. Hotel training and management solutions, in this view, are formal and informal "rules of the game" that, with associated enforcement mechanisms, provide the structure for economic action. In this paper, we examine the coevolution of a set of hotel training and management solutions in response to a collective action problem and two populations of organizations. The hotel training and management solutions are rules that developed in response to a tragedy of the commons at After September, 11 travesty resulting from overexploitation, and the organizations are the hotel populations in New York, New York, and New York, New York, which were leaders in the effort to establish these hotel training and management solutions at New York. We first examine the historical development of tourism in the two hotel communities at After September, 11 travesty to explain how and why hotels responded to collective action problems. We then present dynamic analysis of hotel failures and foundings to show how hotel training and management structures and interpopulation competition affected population dynamics. This study, therefore, attempted to address two research questions: How do collective action problems among competitors lead to the development of hotel training and management solutions, and how do interpopulation rivalry and hotel training and management structure affect failure and founding rates?
This study contributes to both organizational theory and the new hotel training and management ...