The situation of the housekeepers who work in cleaning the hotel rooms is getting worse and worse. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of outsourced workers. The staff employed by the hotel itself now work for subcontracted companies: the same work, under more unfavourable conditions. They charge EUR 2.5 for each room that clean and charge EUR 800 per month, at best, including extra fees. In return, they work 1,800 hours a year.

“According to a recent report from the employers, 60% of the hotels in the state will soon be subcontracted,” said Mari Cruz Elkoro. The data gives cause for concern: “In this way, companies manage to reduce costs. People’s working conditions have worsened.” Sonia San Vicente thinks it is “very cheap” to subcontract cleaners: “In exchange for a remuneration that is very close to the minimum wage, they put a person to work for two or three people.” Elkoro has added that they have high instability contracts, “they give ups and downs per hour and per day and in some cases they pay for a clean room.”

The ELA representative warned that outsourced companies have created a large business: “After all, they manage to ensure that the Hospitality Convention does not apply anywhere, as, in addition to cleaning, other hotel jobs are being outsourced, for example, staff working at the restaurant or at the reception”. In Donostia-San Sebastian, for example, there are hotels in which all services are subcontracted.

Elkoro considers it essential to guarantee the Hospitality Convention, but to do so it is necessary to deal with the company and the workers who are in a vulnerable situation it is not easy: “Single-parent families, migrants or people in extreme economic conditions are the ones who hire the most.”

Moreover, she added that it should not be forgotten that the majority of people working in this sector are women: “That also has to do directly with the bad conditions of the profession.” In any case, San Vicente points out that more and more migrant men are in his company: “Where we were no more than women before, there are now also male migrants, but the common feature of the workers is that most people are in a situation of vulnerability”. Despite poor conditions, workers find it difficult to leave their jobs: “Somehow you get caught.”

The Kellys, abrasive tracks

To denounce this situation, in 2014 several employees of the hotels in Bilbao created the association Las Kellys, which operates in the Spanish state. “The state unions did not take into account the demands of the cleaning workers of the hotels and that is why the Las Kellys Association emerged,” explains Elkoro. ELA has the majority of union workers from the hotels in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia and here they are negotiating with them. The representative of ELA stressed that despite the fact that the Las Kellys Association has done a great deal of awareness-raising and visibility work, it has great difficulty in bringing its demands to the negotiating level: "They're not a union, they're a partnership, and that limits things a lot. On the other hand, here we are debating the cleaning of fourteen or sixteen rooms a day at the negotiating tables, that is where we have set the limits. The Las Kellys Association, for its part, is discussing the minimum ratios of 25 to 30 rooms. The situation is very serious.”

One of the ways to improve working conditions is to enforce the Hospitality Convention for subcontracted companies: “If subcontracted staff have the same conditions as those contracted by the hotel itself, the hotel will be more expensive to outsource than to hire the workers themselves.” This is the main reason for subcontracting: the reduction of expenditure. “If you hire a company to clean the rooms of the hotels and it pays a misery to the cleaners, and also, if they clean a lot of rooms per person, you save expenses.”

A few have managed to implement the Hospitality Convention

Four years ago, St. Vincent and his colleagues began to contact the union. After several negotiations he says that they have made progress: “We will be applied to the Hospitality Convention and if the company ever leaves the hotel, we will become direct employees of the hotel.” It welcomes what has been achieved, before it would have been impossible to imagine such an achievement: “Until four years ago, the company did not allow us to join the unions, nor anyone to show us our employment contract, so we realized that it was our right and we started to engage with the union network.” However, he knows that the situation is not the same for all workers: “The workers change a lot in order not to create networks between them. They kept us in the same place, and we got together and fought for our rights, now they've learned from that mistake, and I don't think they let workers' networks form anymore." The ELA trade union also agrees on this: “Constant changes its focus to its workers to avoid the consolidation of the employment relationship. For example, the Barceló Hotel had a fixed contract with four workers for cleaning 350 rooms. On the eve of the strike the company Constant converted some temporary contracts into indefinite contracts, but many others remain in an irregular situation.”

However, Saint Vincent says that improving working conditions is much more than raising wages: “Our work is very hard. We clean about eighteen rooms a day and we have to bear a great weight. In addition, I have colleagues cleaning 25 or 30 rooms a day, it’s unacceptable.” Elkoro says that this is the next point that the union wants to work on: the health of workers. Assistance or lowering to each other is very poorly seen: “In addition, you risk losing your job.” Saint Vincent is pleased with the progress made in recent months, but knows that they will have to continue working: “We have managed to sign the Hospitality Convention, now it has to be executed.”

An example of this was the indefinite strike initiated on 2 November by the cleaning workers of the rooms of the hotels NH and Barceló de Bilbao. The addresses of both hotels, ignoring the workers' right to strike, contracted the service of an outside company to replace the strikers. ELA considers it unacceptable: “They leave workers without defense and the Bureau of Labor and Inspection does not take action.”

They consider the awareness of hotel owners and users important. Elkoro says that hotels do not want to be responsible for the bad conditions that outsourced companies put on their workers: “They tell us that they have nothing to do with it.” ELA is critical of public institutions: “A head of the Basque Government believes that the strike is a rocket, because it cut off the image of MTV-Bilbao. Perhaps that is why the Basque Government does not act swiftly when these hotels replace strikers and violate the right to strike. What is left for our authorities is not exploitation, but organization and mobilization.”

As for the users, Saint Vincent believes there is everything: “Some users left us with messages of mind during the struggle of Las Kellys, to others, of course, they don’t care about anything.” But when it comes to choosing a hotel, do the users take into account the conditions of the employees? Elkoro explains that the association Las Kellys had a project in hand: “They wanted to create an application to show which hotels met the minimum economic, social and moral rights and which did not.” St. Vincent thinks it is a good idea, although he is convinced that they will not be allowed to do that. The Spanish association has also made a documentary: Hotel Exploitation: The Kellys. The author is Georgina Cisquella and her objective is to raise awareness and raise awareness of the reality of the flat waiters of the hotels. Elkoro and St. Vincent are eager to see. In the meantime, they will continue to fight for their rights and for the freedom of prisoners.