A high-heeled hazard at work?

As a lounge server, Brittany Gora spends a lot of time on her feet, and has, in her four years on the job, had some slips and spills as she carries trays to her customers. So when a class assignment about workplace hazards arose, the University of Alberta student knew just what she’d research—high-heeled shoes.

Required to wear heels for work, Gora, a fourth-year student in the Department of Human Ecology, is always a little worried about hurting herself. “I slip at least once per shift, and I wanted to see if other workers felt they were at risk.”

For her research project, Gora interviewed 35 female wait staff, all of whom said they’d either slipped, tripped or fallen on the job, on average once a week. Of those, 40 per cent said they’d been injured as a result, and 93 per cent were wearing high-heeled shoes at the time. As well, 91 per cent of them reported that they were required by their employers to wear heels on the job, but only 23 per cent received suggestions on appropriate heeled shoes to wear. None were actually supplied with the mandatory footwear.

Her findings have Gora, a 22-year-old clothing and textiles student, wondering why there aren’t regulations about safe footwear—heeled or not—for servers.

“I don’t understand why there isn’t a standard in place. There is legislation for reflective tape on other kinds of work clothing, for instance.”