The cleaning services of the hotels NH and Barceló Nervión are on indefinite strike. While the weekend of the music awards at the Hotel Barceló Nervión the price of the night has risen to 375 euros, the cleaners continue to charge 2.5 euros per room. This misery that lies behind luxury, even if it appears to be a contradiction of the system, is a mechanism for the structural exploitation of the system itself.

The banner and whistle in the hand are many women, there are also men and people from different backgrounds are perceived. All of them are cleaners: they work in a precarious, feminized and rationalized sector in conditions that have a lot of slavery. It is no coincidence that among them there is a high degree of presence of migrated people who have arrived outside Europe. This forces us to analyze the direct relationship between working conditions in situations of slavery, origin and the feminized sector. Thus, Angela Davis claims in her book Women, race and class that these are intertwined elements. Gender, race and class protest at the hotel’s door, where hundreds of young people are housed. You make a hard theory, an even harder praxis.

The cleaning workers have organized themselves within the ELA union and have come with their support to strike. Through the Outsourcing phenomenon, the Barceló Nervión and NH hotels have outsourced the cleaning service to Constant. Outsourcing, increasingly widespread, is especially widespread in the hospitality sector. Although the giant Constant operates in many sectors, most of it is dedicated to hospitality with clawed claws. In this sector it is known for applying the Hospitality Convention for workers, and not for applying the own company agreement: Salaries below EUR 800, pay women below EUR 2.5 per room. That is why the cleaners of both hotels are on strike to apply the Bizkaia Hospitality Agreement. They also call for excessive workloads to be reduced and for employment contracts to be stabilised in a world where temporality prevails.

Last July, the ELA, UGT and CCOO trade unions signed the Bizkaia Hospitality Agreement with the central government. The agreement, which lasts three years, limits the negative effects of outsourcing and guarantees subrogation. This is a pioneering text for all outsourced hospitality areas. The agreement prevents the application of precarious working conditions in outsourced work and applies to all persons working in the sector, although this is a subcontracted area. Furthermore, workers will also be entitled to subrogation. In other words, if the outsourced company changes, the workers retain their jobs.

During the weekend of the MTV Awards, the hotel guests distributed earplugs at the Barceló Nervión Hotel, along with a note of forgiveness in Spanish and English: To apologize for the inconvenience, we apologize for the inconvenience. The tourist will know what to use the stoppers and will judge whether the strikers and the strike are unconscious or unconscious. But there are many of us who are clear about who the obstacles are.

Fortunately, the workers who organize to deal with outsourcing are spreading and the weeks when Constant’s workers are on the street is a terrible victory and are becoming a benchmark. These are the cleaning rooms that work in the Basque Country, the Basque kellyas.