Most hotel housekeepers punch a code on the guestroom telephone, which instantly makes the room show as ready in the hotel computer.

There, she quickly makes several friends and, with the help of the shelter's director, gets an apartment and a job as a hotel housekeeper.

The beds may mean sweet dreams to hotel guests, but they mean pain to many of the nation's 350,000 hotel housekeepers.

"We heard that things were changing for hotel housekeepers, and so we applied this to them," he said.

But after just five months in New York City, he earns $15 an hour as a hotel housekeeper.

A single mother who works as a hotel housekeeper, Ms. Rojas said she needed to drive.

Patricia Marx on what hotel housekeepers really do.

The children of immigrants, living out the trajectory that their parents, working nights as hotel housekeepers and nurse's aides, imagine.

Within the industry, hotel housekeepers experience an injury rate 86 percent higher than non-housekeepers, according to the same study.

A job that seems to have mattered was as a hotel housekeeper.