Two daily work shifts, from Monday to Sunday and sleeping in an extra bed in the warehouse. It is the hell that a chambermaid (employees known as Kellys) had to go through for more than six years at the Castillo de Javier hotel in Pamplona, whose owner has been sentenced to nine months in prison.
Pepa, who was 57 years old at the time, began working in this small 18-room hotel in Pamplona in December 2018, trying to save money with which help your family in Bulgaria.
The conditions in which Pepa has worked in this hotel until April 2015 are described in all crudeness in the final ruling of the Second Section of the Provincial Court of Navarra, which has convicted of a crime against workers’ rights to its owner, Juan Carlos Ciprés.
Without knowing a word of Spanish, the employee started working two shifts a day, from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. for the cleaning of the rooms, and another at night from 11:00 p.m., when the reception was closed.
Pepa, who in six years had no not a single day of rest, slept in the attic of the building, destined to store cleaning and bedding. It was a small room, poorly lit and with no external ventilation, where he had little furniture: an extra bed, a sink, a dresser, a cloth closet, and a television.
In the judgment, in which it also condemns the hotel owner to pay a compensation of 3,000 euros, underlines the fact that “this clamorous situation” of violation of both working conditions and those necessary to lead a dignified life lasted for six years and five months.
To denounce the situation of this worker, this Friday a concentration of LAB and SOS Racism took place in the street San Nicolás de Pamplona in front of the hotel in which a banner with the motto “Javier Castle exploiter!”.
Izaskun Juárez, secretary of LAB in the Pamplona region, has indicated to the media that the sentence has concluded “that there was a exploitation“, but it is” extremely serious that it is not recognized that this person has been exploited “for being a woman and for being a migrant.
Those two factors, he said, together with the fact that Pepa did not speak Spanish, created “a situation of helplessness and vulnerability“to this worker for more than six years.
Juárez has stated that “surely” this hotel is not the only one where these situations occur, so it has made a appeal to the working class “to organize, to empower themselves, to fight and to denounce” this type of abuse.
