The Catalonia Hotel Cleaners Union (Kelly) will set up a reserve centre for accommodation that does not exploit workers. It will be called Kelly's Reserve Center and will be operational from 2022. The list will be completed initially with hotels in Barcelona that respect the working conditions of cleaning employees and, subsequently, with accommodations outside the capital.

For the implementation of the project, they have received funding through the Goteo micro-patronage campaign. The collection started on 18 July, and last Thursday a minimum of EUR 60,000 was raised, according to the study. The campaign will now continue for 40 days, with the aim of achieving a maximum of EUR 90,000, the NGO has reported.

According to Twitter, there are currently no hotels in Catalonia that comply with their labor rights. The objective of the central reserve is precisely to achieve this: In 2018, the Govern approved a project to recognize the Fair and Quality Work Stamp for eligible hotels, but three years later, the proposal has not been launched. The delegate of Kelly in Catalonia, Vania Arana, has pointed out that if the Administration does not intervene, it is they who have to do the work corresponding to the public power: “We want to have decent jobs.”

To this end, a number of requirements were established in 2018. The most important ones were to have cleaning staff on staff, to hire more than three years, to be included in the collective agreement of hospitality in Catalonia and to have an acceptable workload that does not affect health. Now, the reserve station collects a list of hotels that meet other characteristics: equal pay for women and men, offer hiring alternatives to vulnerable groups and carry out indefinite rallies, among others.

In particular, the main demand is that cleaning of hotel rooms should not be subcontracted. Catalan Kelly submitted to this requirement in 2019 to a referendum in the European Parliament, to which several French and British trade union organisations joined. The project, called We end outsourcing, also failed.

Supporters of externalisation

The CCOO and UGT unions, together with the University of Málaga and the Ministry of Tourism, made public a list of hotels that met the workers' rights of cleaners before the pandemic. But this website called Fair Hotels doesn't take all the requests from 'kelly' into account, because it bypasses outsourcing. In fact, trade unions believe that this is a practice that is permitted by law and that if excessive requests are made to hotels, they can be rejected. Consequently, the project promoters have criticized the reserve centre for considering that the extension of this requirement is not feasible.

Management of the centre

However, the cleaners union wants all the requirements to be met, and to do so, it seems that it is a reserve centre that controls the cleaners themselves. The spokeswoman for the 'kelly' of Benidorm, Yolanda García, told the environment La Marea that the inspection methods used by the administrations when they deliver quality stamps are not useful: “The owners know when the inspector giving that recognition will come and the hotel is prepared with new towels or sheets in the rooms they are going to inspect.” Therefore, the new plan will carry out inspections every day to check whether everything is going well: “And we will be very demanding.”