Alarming

On the rare occasion that Peggy and I forgo sleeping in the car and actually take a hotel room, I always make sure to be nice to the maid. For one thing, it's the better thing to do, and when you take time to talk to them, you will hear harrowing stories of the nastiness they get from our fellow humans.

On the more practical level, it will help you be sure to get plenty of coffee for the room and extra towels or shampoo, but that's a distant second to just being nice to people doing a largely thankless job.

People tend to mistreat service personnel, but it's even scarier when you're in a hotel room with some perv from Pennsyltucky who has seen too many pornos set in skeevy motels and he thinks this is his big chance, or when you open the door for room service and happen upon a crime in progress, or a medical emergency, or any of a hundred reasons to wish you were anywhere else right then.

New Jersey, my second favorite state, has become the first state to require that hotels with over a hundred rooms issue emergency buttons to employees. That's great!

“It means a whole lot,” said Iris Sanchez, 40, a housekeeper at Caesars Atlantic City, as Governor Phil Murphy signed the new law this week.  “I know I’m going to be able to go home at the end of the day.”

According to The Press of Atlantic City,  Murphy says hotel staff will now have  “greater security” that will let them be able to “immediately call for help, should they need it on the job.”

And this is good for all of us, not just the staffers. Assemblyman John Armato, D-Atlantic, says housekeepers are often the first people to discover an emergency situation, like a fire or a medical emergency situation.

“It’s not just for their safety, it’s for the safety of the whole hotel itself,” he said.

This law came to fruition because of the work of Unite Here Local 54, the casino workers union representing nearly 2,000 hotel housekeepers in Atlantic City alone.

And they take these things seriously in The Garden State: Hotels that do not get these buttons as required will pay a fine of $5,000 the first time and $10,000 for subsequent violations.

Nationally, large chains such as Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and Wyndham are promising employees to get alarms for staffers who deal one on one with guests.

Good news! Now if people will just behave, at home and away.