The 20,000 housekeepers who work in hotels in the Balearic Islands, the kellys, will have their workloads defined and the maximum number of rooms that they must clean in each establishment starting this season. This is one of the aspects incorporated into the island’s hospitality agreement and that will be put into operation immediately, once the Government of Francina Armengol has already defined the criteria that will be followed to allocate these charges.
The document that the President of the Government presented yesterday together with trade union and business representatives from the tourism sector is a pioneering methodology in Spain that defines from how many rooms and tasks they can take on in one day to the appropriate health and safety conditions in which they have to be developed.
The charges are defined based on a multitude of factors, among which are, for example, the category of the hotel, the age of the housekeeper, the dimensions of the rooms, whether or not they have services such as a terrace, as well as the materials with which the rooms are built, since some, such as glass, represent more work. It is the first work of its kind in all of Spain to measure the workloads of housekeepers, and it responds to a historical demand of these employees.
Hoteliers are obliged to set up a work group made up of workers and managers, which will be the one that defines a safe and healthy method of work based on the analysis of all these factors. The Labor Inspectorate may intervene so that the work method is correctly defined. The Armengol Government insists that it is a mandatory methodology for tourist establishments from this season, since it was incorporated into the agreements of the new collective agreement for hospitality.
“This initiative places us once again as pioneers of what makes us fairer: working for the occupational health of housekeepers,” said the president of the Balearic Government. Armengol recalled that these occupational health measures are added to others adopted in advance, such as the obligation that all hotels in the Balearic Islands change their beds, some 300,000, for other height-adjustable ones to facilitate the work of these employees.
President Armengol affirmed that, to be a leader in economic matters, companies have to function well “and there are none that do if there are no good workers, but there are no good workers if there are no good working conditions.”
The analysis of workloads has already been incorporated into the tripartite agreement that the Government and economic and social agents reached, and which was later reflected in the collective agreement for the hotel industry in the Balearic Islands between employers and unions. The change of beds and the regulation of the workloads of the Kellys have been agreed with the employers, who agreed to include this requirement in the agreement. In this same agreement, a salary increase of 8.5% was approved in two years, which is added to the previous 17%. The rise will have been 25.5% in seven years.
The approval of this proposal comes at the height of the political controversy on the islands, after the president of the Balearic PP and candidate for the May elections, Marga Prohens, defined the obligation to install elevating beds as “the greatest nonsense in tourism policy”. The CEO of the Riu chain, Carmen Riu, has spoken out against these words, assuring that the obligation to install this type of bed is one of the best decisions that have been made on the islands in recent years. The obligation is included in the new Law of Tourism of the Balearic Islands.
