Contributor: Leigh Shelton

who have been struggling to hold on to family healthcare and prevent full-time jobs from becoming part-time.  The workers haven’t had a contract in four years. I wanted Lopez to go to workers’ homes, hear their stories and meet their kids. His stripped-down story telling captures the human condition like no other.

And that’s what he did. He spent an hour at the Santa Ana home of Carmen Guzman, a Disneyland housekeeper-turned-hostess who suffered uterine cancer. He visited a young worker named Robert Cox who rents a room with a co-worker to make ends meet and waited in the rain for some laundry workers to finish their shifts.

It’s not every day that someone testifying before the Senate Labor Committee gets down on her hands and knees — at least not literally. But on Wednesday, more than 30 hotel housekeepers from up and down the state converged on the Capitol to do just that.

Eleazar Dumuk, a hotel housekeeper from the Hyatt Regency Hotel Santa Clara, explained, and demonstrated, why. “In hotel bathrooms, I have to get down on my hands and knees to clean the floor and bathtub well. I wear knee pads under my uniform pants so that I can protect my knees better, but still, the pain in my knees is getting worse and worse. They are swollen, and last week I was in constant pain,” she said.