The arrival of summer in the Balearic Islands is accompanied by a massive arrival of tourists who need services; an arrival that, in 2024, rubs the 4 million people, if we count only until the month of May.
Many people work in these services, among them the floor maids, known as Kellys, dedicated to the maintenance and cleaning of the hotel rooms where tourists stay. The service provided by the Kellys is essential, an issue that became evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, they are often forgotten.
The Kellys began to self-organize almost ten years ago where tourism is the main economic activity. According to the Balearic Labor Observatory, almost 35,000 people were hired in 2023 to clean hotels and other hotel establishments, and so far in 2024 alone 9,501 have already been hired, 4.35% more than the previous year; of these, 84% are women, and 36.8% are of foreign origin from outside the EU. It is fair to say that 63.3% have permanent contracts, but it is important to bear in mind that in 2021 (before the 2022 reform), this figure was only 13.9%.
The Kellys were constituted as an association in 2016 to fight for labor improvements for the collective. Among their demands we find, initially, the officialization of their existence at the state level to be recognized as an association; but also issues related to occupational safety; physical and mental health; conciliation; or wage improvement. In the Balearic Islands, the latest demands point to:
To make visible the lack of personnel present to this professional group, due to the growing and unmanageable difficulties caused by the access to housing by the working population in the Balearic Islands.
To point out the delay in establishing measures to determine and reduce the workload and the benefits of raising the number of beds (which many hotels have not yet incorporated) and which were included in Decree Law 3/2022.
It is clear that there is still a great lack of recognition of occupational diseases (a large part of those registered in the hotel sector correspond to the cleaning sector).
These aspects lead us to consider that women workers in the service sector in our territory have to face very hard working hours that constantly affect their living conditions, health and rest. And this has direct repercussions on how they can directly care for themselves and how they can respond to the care needs of their loved ones.
Now that summer is coming, and the tourists that nourish the economy of our territory, too much doomed, as already mentioned forcefully, to the monoculture of this economic activity, it is worth remembering the censorship of the comic dedicated to Las Kellys (Mallorca has a woman’s name, Council of Mallorca), by the PP, claiming that you can not defend the rights of a group (the workers) to the detriment of the rights of another (the hotelier). From here we invite you to think about tourism from the dimension of care, because an activity cannot be called essential without paying attention to who sustains it. The care of women workers is essential in terms of welfare and social rights.