In the French legislative elections, the NUPES candidate Rachel Keke was elected in the parliament defeating Roxana Maracineanu, former sports minister. A former hotel housekeeper who fought for the rights of her coworkers has become a symbol of the recent revival of France’s left.
A hotel housekeeper who led a strike for better pay and conditions at one of the biggest hotels in Paris could become the first cleaner to be elected to the French parliament, taking on Macron’s former sports minister, Roxana Maracineanu.
Keke was born in Ivory Coast to a bus-driver father and a mother who sold clothes. Her mother died when she was 12 and she had to leave school to care for her brothers and sisters. She arrived in France, where her grandfather fought during the second world war, in 2000. Battling to escape insalubrious housing and support her five children, Keke worked first as a hairdresser, then on a supermarket checkout, and finally as a chambermaid.
Keke worked as a hotel chambermaid for more than 15 years and eventually climbed the ladder to next job grade, becoming a governess who managed teams of cleaners. But after she started working for a hotel in northwest Paris, she noticed how the demands of cleaning hotel rooms threatened the physical and mental health of the people she supervised.
With dozens of other hotel cleaners, Keke led one of the longest hotel strikes in French history against the unpaid overtime and poor working conditions of outsourced cleaning staff. On the picket line, they also warned against the racism and sexual harassment experienced in the job, such as male hotel clients exposing their genitals to cleaners.
She thinks “it’s time” for essential workers to have a voice in Parliament. “Most of the deputies don’t know the worth of essential workers who are suffering,” said the candidate, who has repetitive motion tendonitis in her arm because of her cleaning work and still manages hotel housekeepers.
After winning on Sunday, Keke said she would bring the “voices of the voiceless” to parliament.
Keke says that unlike the vast majority of MPs who make laws but are far removed from the real world, she knows what she’s talking about.
“I’m part of that, we live underground, out of sight. MPs are doing politics but they don’t understand the people who are suffering.”
She hopes they can bring “the real situations we’re living though to the National Assembly so we can decide on concrete laws.”
Her victory in the legislative elections was dedicated to her colleagues at the Ibis hotel, to the cleaners, security guards, care assistants… in short, to the forgotten, poorly paid and neglected employees. “The Assemblée Nationale is ours; it is not only for the rich,” she said in her speech. “I admit, my level of education is that of an elementary school kid, but I have great intelligence. Everyone has intelligence. Rachel is someone who laughs, but when she works, she doesn’t mess around.”
Ms. Keke also has a word for the “desperate” young people of her constituency who say: “France is not good, it is bad:” “I will tell them no. We will work together to show another face of France to young people.”
Sources: Francei 24, Guardian, VOA, Le monde