Hard Facts of Exploitation in our Daily Lives....!

What is exploitation of labour and why are women the most exploited? I had these questions latterly; that is why I decided to write this article. Exploitation is when an employer unethically takes advantage of a worker because of his or her inferior position, giving the exploiter the power to abuse. The term often conjures up pictures of workers labouring for 12 or more hours per day for peanuts an hour. For instance, four/five star hotels in Europe, work with labour brokers/agencies to hire room cleaners (Zimmermädchen/Roomboy). Before they hire you as a cleaner, you will be asked to work three (3) days without getting paid for those days and they vindicate their action by saying that they teach you how to change a guest bedding and clean the room within 19/20 minutes. You will earn 9.31€ per hour when you persevered to clean three rooms within an hour but when is impossible for you to clean within the limited time and definitely month end you will earn less….!

I was a Zimmermädchen myself and had to experience the hardship of their system. They demand you to clean three (3) rooms within an hour, which has proven impossible to most beginners. My work contract indicates that I am supposed to clean 21 rooms in my 7 working hours every day. But since the employer is much aware of this impossibility, we were given only 14 rooms daily. That way they manage to reduce our income by one third every day, without us having any chance of cleaning more rooms to achieve our daily goal, because you will be asked to leave the hotel after 7 hours. Weather you are done or not is not up to us to decide…..After 1 month of work, being present 140 hours at work, through this system I was paid not even half of those hours.

Zimmermädchen is a hard work and mostly those who are working as Zimmermädchen for more than a year, get health problems especially pains on their waist, knees and hands. After you cleaned each room; the merciless supervisor will check how you arranged the room and for example they will call you to remove a small hairy thing on the duvet cover or in the bath room. The conditions of Zimmermädchen are poor because there are not full time workers for the hotels; they are not allowed to eat anything in the hotel except drinking coffee or tea and are badly paid for their labour protected by the law system.

Mostly immigrant women are exploited due to their situation of survival, taking care of children and lack of higher academical qualifications; or because their qualifications are not even accepted in the country they intend to work in. In many countries working laws are also not fair to woman especially when it comes to fair payments compared to their male counterparts. All this accumulates, making them powerless in the face of exploiters…. You will be hired today and when you resign or are asked to leave, because of being too slow, they will get someone new, who is just as eager as you were to get a job. When you begin to work for those companies/hotels you will see new faces every day, replacing one which had left the day before.

But Karl Marx, a German Philosopher, Economist, Sociologist and Revolutionary Socialist, had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation of the unpaid labour of workers. Under his definition, all working class people are exploited. According to Marx, exploitation forms the formation of the capitalist system. All the trillions in bonuses for the hotel owners, every dividend paid to the shareholder of industrial corporations, every euro/dollar collected by capitalist landlords and all of this is the results of the uncompensated labour of working class people.