After two meager corona years, hotels, campsites and holiday parks hope to finally be fully occupied this summer. However, a part seems to run into a wall. A call from NH Nieuws shows that there is a major shortage of cleaners to clean the accommodations. Despite the increases in the collective labor agreement two years in a row, the cleaning sector remains unattractive.
Ozd Celal, employee of the employment agency Hotel Schoonmaak Vacature, recognizes the shortage of cleaners. According to him, the demand for cleaners has always been high, but this is extra because of the holiday period.
“Because more people go on holiday. But also because the employees go on holiday themselves. Often also without proper consultation with the employer, which creates gaps,” he assures.
Shortage
According to director of cleaning company Asenso Facilities, Sam Haidari, the shortage is due to the corona crisis. “A lot of people from this sector then started doing different work. Think, for example, of parcel delivery or the postal service,” he explains.
In cleaning, a lot of work is done with subcontractors, freelancers, and not so much with permanent contracts, says employee Demi of cleaning company Balans in Alkmaar. The company is regularly called for individual jobs, but cannot accept everything.
“We often have to disappoint people because we can no longer accept jobs of less than 8 hours a week for an indefinite period of time. They are not profitable. This is because otherwise it does not reduce costs and because we are also busy,” said Mr. demi.
“At the moment I employ eighty people, but I am certainly twenty people short every day”
It is striking that after a call round various hotels and campsites in North Holland, companies or organizations recognize the problem of the cleaning shortage, but indicate that they have it well organized themselves. For example, an employee of the Capfun de Bongerd holiday park in Tuitjenhorn states that he has heard of the shortage, but that he has many cleaners on permanent employment.
“Fortunately, we are fully equipped. We have permanent employees, but we also use a cleaning company during the holiday season. So we were there on time,” she laughs. “So for us this is really no problem and we are not running into anything at the moment.”
Additional Rewards
Cleaning companies pull out all the stops to attract new staff. The employee of Hotel Schoonmaak Vacature, Celal, says that the company is making an extra effort to reward people in cleaning. “We do this by means of extra rewards above the cleaning collective agreement and we pay more wages on average than other employment agencies. We do this to really attract them to us, because they are desperately needed.”
“At the moment I employ eighty people, but I am certainly twenty people short every day. We just need a lot more people in this industry. Something must ensure that the cleaning sector becomes interesting again,” says Haidairi.
