Las Kellys: How Ethical Was Your Last Hotel Stay?

Who Are Las Kellys?

When you stay in a hotel on vacation, you expect your room to be clean, your bed to be made up each day, and fresh towels in the bathroom. These tasks are fundamental to the hotel experience, but they don’t happen by themselves; somebody makes your bed and everyone else’s in the hotel each morning. Someone vacuums the floor, empties the trash and restocks the minibar. Someone takes away your dirty towels and replaces them with clean ones. The people, largely women, who are responsible for these seemingly simple acts are more or less invisible as they go about their duties.

Have you ever stopped to think about how much they’re paid? How many beds do they make up each day? What other aspects of the hotel are they responsible for? What happens if they get hurt on the job? Many of these women sustain injuries caused by the repetitive motions inherent in the services they provide but receive little or no protection from their employers. They are under constant threat of being fired if they speak up, and the average pay per room made up isn’t enough to buy a bottle of water from the minibar.

In Spain, hotel chambermaids and cleaning women have long been informally referred to as “las kellys, las que limpian” (the girls who clean). The term “las kellys” was transformed from a dismissive slang term into the name of a union that formed in 2016 to fight for the fundamental rights of “the girls who clean.” These workers are the backbone of the hospitality industry, and arguably the backbone of the local economy in tourism-driven cities such as Barcelona.

Las Kellys Association: From Tweets to International Negotiations

A group of female hospitality workers started calling themselves Las Kellys in social media posts in 2014. They started sharing stories of their employment situations—their fears, their injuries, the unfair treatment and unpaid overtime hours demanded by their bosses—and slowly, their numbers grew. In 2015, groups of Las Kellys started to organize on a local level in various tourist destinations around Spain. In 2016, they formally established themselves as the Las Kellys Association. They started to lean heavily on social media and press releases to make their situation known. They claimed that their employment situation worsened day by day, due in part to the outsourcing of their services by hotels, and in part to lack of oversight and regulation.

Today, the union has official chapters in Barcelona, Benidorm, Cádiz, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, La Rioja, Mallorca and Madrid, and has garnered local, national and international attention from the press. It has often united with other workers’ rights groups and feminist organizations in protest, including Mujeres con Voz, the CGT union and la Plataforma Feminista Marina Baixa.

The group’s manifesto calls Las Kellys “an autonomous association made up of chambermaids, their friends and their relatives, that is committed to self-organization and to fight based on common goals. Las Kellys aims to give visibility to the daily problems of housekeeping workers and to contribute to the improvement of their quality of life.”

The organization has been campaigning for the Spanish government to implement concrete protections in an initiative they refer to as the Kelly Law. Some of the demands include: the recognition of occupational hazards; the option of early retirement due to repetitive injuries; an increase in the number of labor inspectors as well as random labor inspections in the hospitality sector; an implementation of optimal labor standards in any establishment legally recognized as a hotel; ergonomic studies and limitations imposed based on the conditions of each hotel or working environment; compliance with a number of national agreements regarding workers’ rights, including Chapter III of the Occupational Risk Prevention Law; the modification of Article 42 of the Workers’ Statute to guarantee equal hiring practices and prevent the illegal transfer of workers; and the outlawing of outsourcing their work.

These were the union’s demands even before the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has severely threatened and often eliminated sources of income for the largely unregulated and therefore often unprotected workers in a number of sectors: delivery men known as riders, housekeepers, riggers, musicians, sound and lighting engineers and a number of categories of freelancers.

Las Kellys in the Media Spotlight

In 2018, the well-known Spanish journalist and documentary filmmaker Georgina Cisquella made a documentary about their situation, called Hotel Explotación: Las Kellys. The film documents the struggle for labor rights by the thousands of women who work cleaning hotel rooms, as did the series launched two years later by Spanish screenwriter Héctor Lozano.

In 2019, several chapters of Las Kellys (including the one in Barcelona) as well as representatives from the hospitality sector and trade unions in both France and England met with MEPs from the European Parliament and the European Commission to plead their case; specifically, for intervention on an international level that would prohibit subcontracting hospitality services in the EU, which undercuts workers’ ability to negotiate for fair wages.

In spite of heavy resistance from the hotels, and even on occasion from other trade unions that have conflicting objectives, the union has slowly been making headway. In 2020, Las Kellys Catalunya celebrated a ruling in their favor when a judge declared that the Gran Hotel Barcelona took illegal action when firing an employee for joining Las Kellys in response to the hotel’s decision to outsource its housekeeping services.

“I Reserve with Las Kellys” Hotel Reservation Center

The latest project by the Las Kellys union is the creation of a reservation portal under the motto “I reserve with Las Kellys.” The platform is designed to give travelers the option to stay at hotels that meet the union’s specific requirements for respectable working conditions. The project is still getting off the ground, but as of this writing the union has obtained over €90,000—much more than the minimum of €60,000 that it needed to launch—through a crowdfunding campaign on Goteo.org.

On the platform, travelers will be able to choose from a list of hotels in which Las Kellys has union representation and can guarantee that their employers comply with risk prevention measures and applicable labor laws. The goal is to reconcile the well-being of hospitality workers with the leisure demands of tourists, and “make the world a cleaner place.”

The idea stemmed from the union’s unsuccessful campaign in 2018 to promote a “Seal of Quality” that could be awarded to hotels that met its labor standards. The campaign was approved by the Catalan Parliament, but neither the Catalan government nor the Spanish Department of Labor ever took steps to implement the measure. The union grew tired of waiting and decided to cut out the middleman—in this case, slow-moving government officials—and offer the choice directly to the consumer, with plans to launch the booking platform in 2022.

The consumer—that’s you, me, or anybody else who stays in a hotel when traveling—will play a crucial role in whether or not Las Kellys is able to achieve its goal of improved working conditions once the booking portal is launched. If hotel guests choose to take the treatment of housekeepers and other hospitality workers into consideration when they decide where to stay, hotels will have a stronger economic incentive to take adequate care of their employees.