Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) has called a strike for some 170,000 hospitality workers in the Canary Islands - specifically tourist accommodation staff - for Holy Thursday and Good Friday, understanding that after attempting for seven months to bring employers to the table to achieve labor improvements, they have not responded.
In a press conference this Thursday, union representatives justified this decision on the grounds that tourism companies have broken billing records year after year since the pandemic, without, in their opinion, translating into salary improvements and working conditions for their staff, "who mostly do not make it to the end of the month."
Thus, they have called a general strike for the upcoming April 17 and 18, that is, Holy Thursday and Good Friday, in all hotels, apartments, aparthotels, and other tourist accommodations in the archipelago.
The general secretary of the CCOO Services Federation in the Canary Islands, Borja Suárez, has stated that the Government of the Canary Islands lives "in an ideal world" in which it boasts at tourism fairs of the good data of the sector, but forgets the "B side," which is - he emphasizes - that the good data "are leading to poor and precarious workers."
"Faced with the continuous cry of employers about productivity, absenteeism, and that people do not want to work, we must step forward and shout that people do want to work, but they want a dignified job," Suárez remarked, then pointing out that they have been mobilizing at a regional level for seven months to seek social justice without employers showing responsibility.
From CCOO, they have shown their weariness at the lack of dialogue they attribute to business organizations, in the face of which "there is no other option than to go on general strike," in the words of the secretary of Union Action of the CCOO Services Federation, Francisco Javier Velasco, who has warned of a possible indefinite strike if they do not sit down to negotiate despite the pressure measures.
"We have the hospitality industry that billed the most in the entire State, but we do not have the best salaries or the best working conditions in the entire State," Velasco stated, then adding that there is no reinvestment in occupational risk prevention or in improving salaries.
And in that sense, the union has warned of the excessive workload suffered by staff, with more musculoskeletal diseases that mainly affect women (up to 75% of the total), with the chambermaids being the most affected group.
In that sense, the organization secretary of the CCOO Services Federation, Remedios Moreno, has indicated that it costs the unions "their lives" to make companies understand that "health and reconciliation positively impact their own businesses."
And she has given a series of data, such as that 70% of workers in the Canary Islands have split shifts and that this is the autonomous community where the most Saturdays are worked, and the second in terms of Sundays, as well as the region that works until later and also the one that does the most night shifts.
