Hospitality workers threaten strike after record-breaking summer

BarcelonaHotels have been experiencing record-breaking summers for years, and this summer will be no exception. In the first half of the year alone, a total of 9.25 million foreign tourists visited the country. they chose Catalonia as a holiday destination, a figure never seen before for a sector that has earned €10.56 billion in the first six months of the year. Economic results that workers are far from seeing in their pockets.

With the summer season about to end, UGT, the majority union in the hospitality industry in Catalonia, called a protest this Thursday to demand the unblocking of negotiations for a new collective agreement, which expired last year. Some 150 union members gathered this Thursday in Plaça Catalunya to demand an agreement with the employers that would address the loss of purchasing power and precarious working conditions. If the employers do not give in, they have threatened to strike. For now, the only issue they have agreed on is the one regarding the outsourcing of some services, such as room cleaning by chambermaids, which will now be included in the hospitality agreement and not in the cleaning agreement, with lower salaries.

Salary increase

One of the obstacles to achieving a new agreement is the salary increase planned for the next three years. With a base salary of €1,500 gross per month in fourteen payments, employers are unwilling to give more than a 3% annual increase, while workers are demanding 4.5%, in line with what they achieved in the Balearic Islands. "The behavior of employers toward hospitality workers in Catalonia is that of real swindlers. They want everything for themselves and don't want to redistribute the wealth being generated," criticized the general secretary of the UGT (General Workers' Union) in Spain, Pepe Álvarez, who warned that they will not sign "a downward agreement." In this regard, the union criticized the fact that the Ministry of Public Works is dragging out negotiations to avoid having to pay salary increases during the peak season.

In addition to improving wages, the UGT is also demanding shorter working hours for hotel workers. More than anything, it's due to all the overtime they have to work due to a lack of staff. The union has estimated that employees are working between seven and eight hours each week, without pay, and are forced to work "absolutely unbearable" hours.

The goal is to reach the 37.5-hour week that Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz is fighting for, but here she runs into another obstacle: the difficulty of finding enough staff. With more than 337,300 employees, the union estimates that around 50,000 will retire in the coming years. The general secretary of the UGT (Catalan Workers' Union), Camil Ros, has invited employers to reflect on why there is a labor shortage in the sector. "The lack of staff is due to the fact that people prefer to work elsewhere than in the hospitality sector," he noted, adding that employers are "very shameless."

The next meeting between unions and employers isn't scheduled until the end of September, after the peak tourist season in Catalonia. That's when workers will decide whether to escalate the protests and call a sectoral strike.