“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

Abstract

The Spanish room attendants’ movement, known as ‘Las Kellys’, has directly challenged hotel owners, unions and local governments. Its actions and results have generated a growing interest in the academic literature on labour and organizations, because it presents as a social phenomenon which seems to sidestep the usual key actions of similar movements. As this case is still very new, there are not yet any systematic academic studies explaining how the Kellys construct their identity as a group and coordinate their actions. Here we present the notion of collective agency as a tool for analysing and understanding these processes. Based on an empirical study conducted in the last three years, we argue that the Kellys constitute a movement which should be understood as a collective agency woven from relationships of solidarity and resistance, which can be summed up in two slogans: ‘We are the women who clean’ and ‘We are the structural base of the hotel’. Both slogans permit the emergence of a profile which gives a specific identity to the work of room attendants in Spain and makes them unique and sui generis among social movements.