The research points to the fact that much of the strategies carried out by "Las Kellys", which have taken their struggle beyond their profession, can serve as inspiration for other social movements and collectives.
The reform of employment laws in Spain in 2012 had direct and highly negative consequences for thousands of workers: cheaper dismissals, more corporate power, and an increase in open-ended contracts. One of the groups that experienced the most negative consequences is known as "Las Kellys", a group made up of female hotel room attendants in charge of cleaning hotel rooms and other areas.
Researchers from the Department of Social Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Alan Valenzuela Bustos and Francisco Tirado Serrano, and from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) Ana Gálvez Mozo and Verna Alcalde González, analysed how collectives such as Las Kellys created their identity as a group and coordinated their actions through solidarity and resistance.
Very often, these room attendants work long and exhausting hours for very low wages and under precarious working conditions. In addition, they carry out tasks that have been feminised, undervalued and are often made invisible. "There are several dimensions that contribute to the invisibility of Las Kellys, in which factors such as gender, race and social class converge.
Likewise, they do cleaning work, which historically has been required to be invisible in the social space of hotels ", explains Alan Valenzuela, PhD student of the UAB's Person and Society in the Contemporary World programme and lead autor of this study, supervised by Ana Gálvez from the UOC and Francisco Tirado from the UAB.
From Facebook to a collective struggle
Las Kellys emerged as an organisation to fight against this situation, and to improve their conditions through collective action. The first steps of this social movement took place when a Facebook group was created in which hotel room attendants shared their experiences at work, listened to each other and offered each other mutual support. The movement to improve their working conditions was officially launched in 2016.
Since then, Las Kellys have managed to shine a light on their working conditions. "Not only have they made the precarious nature of employment in the hotel cleaning sector the subject of media attention, but they have also placed it at the centre of public debate. They have shown society the terrible working conditions which they are subjected to on a daily basis in a very shocking manner", explains Ana Gálvez, UOC lecturer and co-author of the study. Behind these achievements is a strategy based on solidarity, their capacity for mobilisation and activism, and the enormous empowerment they have achieved as a collective.
Inspiration for other groups
The movement was created based on two concepts: solidarity and resistance, which are in turn represented in their most evocative slogans. The first: "We are the women who clean", created a relationship of solidarity among all women who do this work. The second: "We are the structural base of the hotel", acts as a slogan of resistance aimed at maintaining and improving their working conditions, and identifying room attendants as key workers within the hotel industry.
With these two slogans, Las Kellys have succeeded in raising their profile and empowerment, which has helped to reinforce their message and convey the importance of their work to society.
The researchers consider that much of the work done by this collective can serve for other social movements and collectives to draw inspiration from their creativity in proposing alternatives and doing things differently, and from their strategies to enhance the visibility of work that was previously hidden and undervalued.
Original article:
Alan Valenzuela Bustos, Ana Gálvez Mozo, Verna Alcalde González & Francisco Javier Tirado Serrano (2023) 'We are the women who clean and the structural base of the hotel': Las Kellys, the collective agency and identity of Spain's room attendants, Current Issues in Tourism, DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2023.2198119
