Undercover as a hotel cleaner in Ireland: ‘Lifting the heavy mattress, I cry tears of rage and exhaustion’

I had been interviewed online for the hotel cleaning job I applied for through an agency back in my home country, the Czech Republic. Did I mind that the hotel was in a secluded location with nothing to do in the evening, they’d asked me in the interview. I’d said no, that I like solitude. Now I am being shown around the hotel and the kitchen, where I meet the cook and two other guys – all of them Slovaks. Just as I was surrounded by Poles while on the farm in Germany, here I feel I could be in Slovakia. The cook, taking a break, tells me that it is his last day. I ask if he is leaving because of the low pay. He breathes in slowly and says that he’s leaving because of the stress.

Speak English!

At 8.30am the following day, I am teamed up with two female colleagues, Nina, 19, and Veronika, 20, to start work on the bedrooms.

I go to the second floor to help Veronika, who is also my roommate in the cramped staff hostel. Veronika tells me more than once not to spend so much time on bed-making, that the beds look nice already. “It’s not your bed. It’s good enough,” she says.

At one point during our shift I manage to lose both Nina and Veronika. On finding them again I blurt out, in Slovak: “I couldn’t find you!”. “In English!” one of the managers, who is in the vicinity, shouts so loudly that I jump. Considering Veronika knows even less English than I do, it seems completely absurd to communicate in English.

In the back yard, after her shift, Veronika sighs: “I shouldn’t have come back here.” She worked at the hotel for five months last year, and she got talked into returning. The hotel promised to pay her more than the minimum wage, but that promise was broken. And the workload didn’t get better, it got worse. “There used to be five people in housekeeping here, we could handle it, but you can’t do it with two people,” she complains. She says she came back “because of the money” as she can’t make any in Slovakia and doesn’t want to be a burden on her parents.

I work for 11 hours, but it feels like 20

I ask my colleagues about contracts. “They won’t give you a contract. I had to pressure them for two and a half months to give me one. And I couldn’t get a PPS number the entire time, so they kept taking 40% of my earnings [in tax]. The first pay cheque was €315!” Veronika says. Until a worker has an Irish personal public service (PPS) number the state takes emergency tax and social insurance, which you claim back later. But you can’t get a PPS without a contract.

I meet Sára in the back yard. She is a quiet 21-year-old from central Slovakia. She had wanted to work in the kitchen, but the management put her on reception because her English is good.

As shifts go, today is terrible, really terrible. Nina is off so I end up working for 11 hours, but it feels like 20. I barely stop for a second, I don’t go to the bathroom, I don’t have time for a drink of water, nothing. Before now, I never would have believed it was possible to create such a hell in which we feel compelled to work as hard as this the entire day, even without a supervisor watching us.

From 9 am we are going: cleaning the toilets next to reception, then we each get our bedroom lists. I start on the first of my rooms: clean the bathroom; change the beds; dust the furniture; refill the soap, body wash and shampoos, tea, coffee, milk; wash the cups. Veronika, working on the second floor, keeps texting me on WhatsApp, which we are supposed to monitor all the time: come on, come on, just do it, we have a lot to do.

There’s less than 10 minutes for us to eat lunch.

Back on duty, Veronika is yelling at me for not going fast enough or making mistakes in the rush. Lifting the heavy mattresses, I cry tears of rage and exhaustion. She is totally stressed that we aren’t keeping up, and she curses the hotel for putting us under such pressure.

When we eventually finish the bedrooms we are told to clean the dining room, then set the tables for breakfast.

Suddenly, Sára comes running over to say a guest has complained: his room has not been cleaned. I missed one. When I get back to the uncleaned room I find an angry Veronika, already on the case. She screams at me that I am completely stupid. Later, I go back to the dining area, realising that as my hours are not recorded anywhere (I am not yet logged in to the hotel’s fingerprint-based ID system) I am basically working for free. I finish after 8pm – two hours later than my official finishing time.

I am so tired that I don’t eat and instead of dinner I walk to the petrol station 2km away for a can of beer. We are not allowed to buy beer in the hotel. The bosses can see us coming and going via CCTV in the hallway of the shabby hostel where we sleep.

Later, Veronika sends a WhatsApp: “Sorry about today. I’m really sorry, I was just overworked. I hope you understand. I don’t want us to fall out.” And a smiley face.

If they want to screw me, they’ll screw me

I start to get used to the routine. But I do something to my shoulder lifting those heavy mattresses. Maybe I really am too old for this job, as the woman at the Slovak-run job agency had hinted when I was looking for hotel work. I’m 45. I could handle it if there was more time, but things are organised in such a way that it is impossible.

When it looks as if there won’t be much work on a given day, staff are told they can have it off. Not everyone is happy with that as we are only paid for the hours worked.

There’s a lot of ambiguity about payslips, and colleagues say if I leave the job early I won’t get paid at all. Nina has been crying because she got paid so little in the last round. She is exhausted but hasn’t kept track of her hours. No one here seems to keep a record of the actual hours worked. Mikuláš, a nice young waiter whose ambition it is to have an organic farm, says: “Why would I? If they want to screw me, they’ll screw me.”

The next evening, I meet Sará in the back yard. She is totally down, saying she should have stayed in Slovakia and worked for €4 an hour there, rather than put up with what she has to do here in Ireland.

She has come here with her boyfriend Sebastian, who works as a cook, to pay off their debts. If they didn’t have the debt to pay off, or even if they had enough for their fare home, they would leave. But they have nothing.

Every employee has a right to one day off a week. But because there aren’t enough staff, some haven’t had a day off in weeks. In the schedule sent out, the hours change all the time, but the underlying system is clear to everyone: they pay for as few hours as they can get away with. Sometimes people work only from early morning until 11am, and then again late at night. The hours in between are completely unpaid.

My days off

I get a text to say I will have Monday and Tuesday off. On Monday morning, I sleep until 10, have a coffee and walk to the petrol station shop with Barbara. On the way, she recalls how when she was working in Slovakia, they had a Ukrainian who worked every day and never had a day off, and yet he earned less than she, a part-timer did. “For them, we are something like the Ukrainians are for us,” she said about the relationship Irish people have with Slovakian workers.

After a week, I text the duty manager a polite message to tell him that I’m leaving. I enjoy the last few evenings in the back yard and I’m very sad to leave this great group of people.

On the following Monday, he suddenly texts me, asking what my bank details are and wondering if I managed to get a PPS number. I assume the hotel has found out that I am a journalist because I told some of my colleagues before I left.

In a group chat on WhatsApp, the manager writes: “Hi all, please let me know if you did not receive a payment in your bank last week or if you have never received payment. Also let me know if you are not receiving your payslip. ” Payslips had not gone to anyone that I spoke to previously. I was told when I took the job that it paid the Irish minimum wage, then €10.50 an hour, before deductions of €62.40 a week for board and lodgings and €3 a week for use of the laundry facilities. I don’t know how much I should have earned, because after I left I couldn’t get a PPS number so too much tax was deducted. Eventually I got sent €369 for eight days’ work.

After leaving, I hear from Sára that she and Sebastian went back to Slovakia and planned to stay there. But they couldn’t find another job so they returned to Ireland. She writes: “It will be better now that we know what we are getting into. We have lower expectations.”

Saša Uhlová is a staff writer at the Czech online daily Deník Alarm. Reporting for this series was supported by The Endowment Fund for Independent Journalism.