“You work from Monday to Sunday without lunch break. That’s basically what you live for because You start at 08:30 in the morning and don’t finish until 19:30. all at once. I lasted two months without leaving a single day empty and quit when I was defeated. Spots started to form on my skin and my hair fell out. stress. I was hospitalized”. This is the testimony of Carmen, a former cleaner of tourist apartments in central Valencia. They paid her. 500 euros per month for that job
The pressure is marathon days without stopping to eat, poverty wages, unpaid overtime, and contracts that cannot be shown. These conditions are some tourist apartment cleaners They multiply in the center of big cities. Most are migrant women who need money and have no other options, so they swallow it together. bad conditions.
Carmen is one of them, and she passed away in the summer of 2021. She prefers to keep her identity while continuing to work in the industry. She now cleans hotel rooms and admits she’s doing much better, but working in tourist apartments last year left her completely exhausted.
“They gave me a contract for a trial month where I would work 20 hours. But you don’t work 20 hours or 40 hours.” Finally Carmen did 70 hours per weekMonday to Sunday and without a break. All this under pressure and at a very high rate of work because there were so many floors and few women to clean.
“At first it was three of us, but soon one of them couldn’t stand it and it was just two of us. They told us they were going to hire someone else, but they didn’t,” he says. . At first, when they were three people, the cleaning time was already very tight.
“We were coming in and they were telling us ‘this floor needs to be done in an hour and a half’ and maybe the floor was upside down and much more. If we hadn’t done everything so quickly, they would have come and scolded us. But if it’s an apartment with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large kitchen and dining room, or even a terrace, there isn’t enough time to do all that in an hour. ‘ laments Carmen.
non-existent contracts
Carmen 20 hour trial contract signedexceeded the period in the first month. They promised for a long time that they would sign a new one, but he did not sign anything. Just promises. The same thing happened to his partner Mónica, who had never seen his physical contract, and after working for a year, he decided to ask the company for a few pay slips as he wanted to move, but they gave him nothing despite their insistence.
The company is currently on trial for not paying its workers overtime, but Mónica chooses not to speak and keeps her identity private. In the case of Carmen, she also didn’t see her contract and didn’t get any of the extra hours she got, which was just too much.
He worked for two months without a day’s rest. “I only took the first weekend off, but every day was like that. When we started working alone, the days went from eight in the morning to half past eight in the evening and we had to finish everything that day because the customers were about to drop in,” she accuses. The vast majority were “foreigners, except for some bridges from which the Spaniards came, but they were the least.”
It wasn’t Carmen who finally stopped, but her body forced her to stop. “There was a day when I couldn’t go to work because I was physically fatal, days ago my skin started to develop spots, I got really sick, my voice was hoarse and I couldn’t speak and even my hair started falling out. i finished at the hospital They confirmed that it was due to stress and gave me pills to prevent itching,” she complains.
Finally, he called his company to say he wasn’t coming back and to get paid for his overtime. After several encounters with his employer, He did not even object and decided to close the department due to bad mood. Then who suffered. After six more months at work at that job, his partner finally tipped him off.
It is a large cleaning company with many different divisions, from cleaning companies to homes, passing through the touristic apartments, which is the part where Carmen is located. Almost all of the workers were immigrant women.
A wristband to control student apartments
Raquel is another of the workers who was there, in this case cleaning student apartments through a company. “They even put us on a wristband that controls the maximum time we can spend in each house and where we are at all times,” she denounces.
Without excursions and with the bus card
Working conditions demanded it. They didn’t have to travel from place to place.. “We went with bags of sheets because we did the laundry and we also had to take the bus that went with us to get around,” she explains. In fact, “We had to make rooms in cities outside Valencia as well, and if we stayed in Picanya for a day then they wouldn’t have taken us to the city, each would return on their own.
The work left him lifeless for months, but he states that the hardest part wasn’t his own because “in my case I had no burdens as I was young, but my partner, who has several daughters, suffered terribly to drop them off at school and pick them up. In the end, he only saw his daughters for a few hours and because he needed the money It lasted for months,” he says.