The Ibis Styles hotel in Arnhem, the Netherlands, employed about twenty asylum seekers and a group of Ukrainian workers without valid work permits, and for extremely low pay. This is according to an investigation by the Nieuwsuur program. The workers were registered through several opaque intermediaries.
Experts consider the situation to be labor exploitation and possible manifestations of human trafficking. The Dutch Labor Inspectorate has already launched an official investigation.
According to journalists, the cleaners were recruited directly from the street. They dealt with intermediaries associated with the German company AHR Clean. Some workers did not receive their salaries at all, or received them only partially. Those who were paid, according to their own words, received from 3.50 to 4.50 euros per cleaned room.
A Ukrainian couple working at a hotel was forced to split their salaries, earning €1.75 per room. The only additional “benefit” they said was that they could eat leftovers from the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Those who were paid received cash in the hotel lobby, which is illegal under Dutch law.
When the workers tried to collect their pay at the hotel, they were escorted out by the police. It turned out that the cleaners were allowed to work at the Ibis without the mandatory work permits that are required in the Netherlands for non-EU citizens, including asylum seekers.
Despite the lack of work permits, the asylum seekers were still given contracts. At the same time, lawyers note that these documents appear to be a direct translation from German and include terms not used in Dutch labor law, and therefore lack legal force.
The Ibis Styles hotel in Arnhem is part of the Novum Hospitality group, which manages more than 130 hotels, mainly in Germany. The company said it was studying the situation and pointed to the German cleaning company, Ö&I Clean Group GmbH, which it had hired. They also announced the start of an internal investigation. Still, they shifted responsibility to the company AHR Clean UG, which they had hired for the work.
AHR Clean said that work permits had indeed been requested for some of the asylum seekers, but that they had not yet been issued for all of them at the time the work began. At the same time, the company did not explain why it did not wait for the permits to be issued and why it did not use legal secondment agreements for employees.
This week, some cleaners – asylum seekers living in accommodation centres in Arnhem – were paid their salaries in cash after Nieuwsuur journalists contacted the companies involved. Another group of workers has still not received their money.
