Bondy (AFP)

Union struggle and female solidarity: Sylvie Kimissa, a 50-year-old Congolese mother who entered Europe through Italy, recounts the journey that led her to the Ibis Batignolles, in Paris, where she leads a women's strike room since July 2019.

"In this society, it is always the employers who win", criticizes this strong head, determined to reverse the trend: STN, his employer, but also the hotel and the Accor group, the principals, are assigned on Wednesday before the Paris Prud'hommes Council for moral and sexual harassment.

"We immigrants, it is not our rights that we think of first, but the money to live. These women are invisible, unable to denounce their situation," she continues, at the head of a group of 20 chambermaids eager to obtain better wages and working conditions and to be integrated into Accor.

However, nothing predestined Sylvie, who studied the secretariat in Congo-Brazzaville, to rebel against her boss.

But due to lack of opportunity in her country, she had to resolve to leave it in 2009 and landed in Melun after a detour through Italy, where her tourist visa had just expired.

"This was where the visa was easiest to obtain, she recalls. At home, there was nothing left. On the train to Paris, it was my lucky day: there is no no police check ".

Although undocumented, she quickly obtained childcare.

Finally declared, she obtains a receipt giving her the right to work, then renewable one-year residence permits and finally, after five years, the Grail: a resident card.

"It's a marathon, she assures. Without payslip, you can wait 20 years! His papers, it is thanks to his motivation that we get them."

In the meantime, she moved to Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis) and a little boy was born in 2011. In search of "stability" and a permanent contract, she thus arrived in 2013 at the Ibis Batignolles where she is established after one year of fixed-term contract.

In the huge hotel in the 17th arrondissement, subcontractors followed one another and STN won the contract for the chambermaids in 2016.

“After two months, they started to divide the employees. It was a military dictatorship. There are cameras everywhere in the hotel. When they saw us talking to two or three, they sent the guards and put us warnings. We were terrified, ”she says.

Above all, external staff are paid by the task and not by the hour.

For six hours a day, that is to say in theory 21 rooms to be cleaned, Sylvie receives 1,000 euros per month.

- Solidarity fund -

"Often we do a lot more, up to 3 hours of overtime a day and they are never paid. Some even do a lot more," she continues.

Difficult in these conditions to "make ends meet", she tells modestly from the 11th floor of the HLM building where the family lives in three.

"I've been fighting for a second bedroom for four years because the little one has grown up," she says in passing.

"Our work allows us to pay for the essentials, not to live. During the first nine months (of the strike), we lived with the solidarity fund. With the Covid, we were put on partial unemployment and we now touch approximately 600 euros per month ", she explains.

"I discovered a kind, helpful girl. She became more than a big sister," says her colleague Rachel Keke.

"When I argue with my husband, she's the one I call. I trust, I know she's doing it."

United with other women in the union struggle, Sylvie has learned to feel "proud" in the struggle led by the CGT-HPE union (prestigious and economical hotels).

"It takes courage. What we sign will remain and will benefit those who come after," she is convinced as her nine-year-old son tells her she wants to become "a trade unionist to defend the workers".

So many arguments that validate his life choices despite the feeling of persistent "exile" and two "internal wounds": that of not having been able to return to Congo since 2014, and that of having abandoned for 10 years one. of his two eldest daughters, in Senegal.

"I do not regret having left because I could not have built this in the Congo", she admits, between "sadness and bitterness".

"I still have a home, I am an employee".

And then, he still has his dream: to open a restaurant in the Congo and "to be able to go back and forth".

© 2021 AFP