A proposal for amendments to the Labor Market Act is currently in public discussion. One of the proposals is to introduce vouchers for paying engaged cleaners of apartments to address their chronic shortage. Due to this situation, not only apartment owners and those involved in nautical tourism are facing significant problems, but also companies that offer cleaning services.
In this regard, the Charter Activities Group of the Croatian Chamber of Economy (HGK) has proposed a solution. As they emphasize, they have been seeking a solution for many years to legally employ cleaners for just one to two days a week. During the guest change, which usually occurs on Saturdays, charter agencies note that they need additional employees in the cleaning position, but they find it difficult to find a way to employ them. I would add that in the last few years, since the COVID pandemic, Saturday is not the only day when guest changes occur, although it seems to me that it is slowly returning to ‘initial settings’ (Saturday).
The HGK states that when engaging cleaners, all available employment modalities are used, such as contracts for additional work, student contracts, and so on, but in practice, more than half of the planned employees are ad hoc engaged employees on the cleaning day. Such employees significantly complicate the registration and resolution of the necessary paperwork, as they are housewives who cannot be adequately registered in advance, as they cannot be regulated by a contract for additional work, and they are unwilling to open any kind of side activity just for a few Saturdays during the season.
Payment of (Un)employed
Specifically, even if, for example, 50 cleaners are agreed upon for a certain Saturday, experience has shown that not everyone shows up, and it can happen that more than half of those agreed are missing, with a justified or unjustified reason. At the moment when all those missing are counted, the search for replacements begins, which needs to be adequately reported. Since this is a difficult and unattractive job, employers are happy when they find anyone willing and capable, and they simply cannot think about missing the engagement of an available worker for procedural reasons, which is a problem at that moment because regulations need to be respected.
Therefore, the aforementioned HGK Group proposes a voucher that would operate on the same principle as in agriculture. But not only would unemployed persons be registered through vouchers, but also employed ones (those who already have a job and would gladly earn extra by cleaning) because this way the employer would have the option of quick and easy registration on a specific day of all persons who show up for cleaning.
