Those who are on vacation want one thing above all in the evening, after all the experiences and drinks: lay their head on a spotlessly clean pillow. At that moment, one usually does not think about the fact that someone has freshly made, shaken and smoothed this pillow. If at all, it only occurs shortly before departure to leave a banknote on the bedside table for the invisible. But it is more likely that you groan at the moment that everything is so stressful again, only five minutes until check-out, and the suitcase still won’t close.
They no longer want to be invisible: Spain’s maids have organized themselves. Your union is simply called Las Kellys, short for read que limpian, the ones who clean. “We believe in tourism that is fair – to the planet and to the employees,” says Vania Arana, spokeswoman for Las Kellys in Barcelona. “We chambermaids do the core business of every hotel and at the same time we are treated like dirt.” The 54-year-old Peruvian has been working as a maid in Spain for almost 30 years. She is now in pain almost every day. According to a study, 70 percent of housekeepers take medication to do their job. Arana has seen the pressure increase: “We used to have to create twelve rooms a day, today it is 30.”
A fairtrade seal for holidays
Spain’s chambermaids have been demonstrating against exploitation for years. Now they want to team up with those who have the say in the industry: the tourists. Las Kellys want to set up their own booking portal, in which only hotels are allowed that meet minimum standards in the treatment of their staff. A fair trade seal for holidays, so to speak. They started crowdfunding six weeks agoThey wanted to raise 60,000 euros in start-up capital. The success surprises you: More than 78,000 euros have already been donated. The website and the app that are financed with it will soon also be available in English and German. The maids think big: “We want to make the world cleaner.”
However, they cannot expect any support from Spain’s powerful trade unions. “First of all, because it is very complicated. The whole thing has an enormous range, and the money that you are collecting there is not enough back and forth,” says Gonzalo Fuentes of the CCOO union. But such criticism does not discourage Las Kellys. “We women have waited a long time for help from the unions and we have waited in vain,” says Arana.
There have been plans for a similar booking portal for years: Fairhotels.es even received state support. But bureaucracy and the pandemic have paralyzed the project. For the Kellys, the rules there would be too lax anyway, they also want to exclude hotels that employ their maids through subcontractors and thus circumvent the collective agreement. According to Vania Arana, a certain type often ends up in such “garbage contracts”: single women with several children, foreign women who cannot defend themselves. It wasn’t long ago that Arana was one of them.