Workers stripped naked at luxury hotel dismissed after speaking out

Former housekeeping staff from Mount Nelson Hotel who were stripped naked in July last year want justice and compensation for the indignity and the trauma that they suffered as a result. Ten housekeeping staff members, all women, were strip searched by the hotel’s security guards after a client reported that they lost money.

In an exclusive interview with Elitsha, Osma Thukela and Nombeko Bheku related how they were made to strip naked in front of two security guards and the housekeeping supervisor.

“We were about to knock off; we were on our way to the change room. The security control room is near the change room. As I was passing the security room, a security guard told me that we have to go to the control room and that housekeeping staff have to line up outside the control room. We all thought that we were going to be frisked by security, as they usually do so before we go into the change room. But, I could hear complaints from those who have been inside already. The first person who came out of the security control room was cursing and so was the second person and I was the third person to go in,” said Bheku.

The workers said that the hotel tried to buy their silence by giving each of the ten workers an amount of R3,000 and offered a hotel sleepover. They also claim that the money for which they were searched was not lost on the same day.

Thukela and Bheku have been dismissed for the alleged theft but they argue that they are being targeted for reporting the strip search to their union.

Video produced by Mzi Velapi and edited by Sindile Gulwa

The Mount Nelson hotel

The Mount Nelson, a Belmond hotel in Cape Town, is a 5-star luxury hotel. In 2019, the Belmond hotel group was bought by LVMH for R46-billion ($3.2bn). LVMH is a French multinational that owns brands such as Moët & Chandon, Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. Last year, Mount Nelson was ranked 28th on the list of the ‘World’s 50 Best Hotels’, the highest ranked hotel in Africa.

In response to Elitsha, the hotel admitted that its staff were strip searched but blamed the security guards from an outsourced company and security contractors. “We were appalled when we found out about the intrusive physical searches conducted by a security contractor on some of our housekeeping staff in July 2024. We immediately concluded a thorough investigation, which resulted in the termination of our contract with the outsourced security company, as well as the security contractors implicated in the incident,” said the hotel spokesperson, Gabriele Palmer Bolton. She did not provide details of the reported theft.

The Mount Nelson prides itself as the first hotel to have cold and hot water in the country. Photo from Mount Nelson Facebook page.

The outsourced security company that is being blamed is Fidelity Security Group. Charnel Hattingh, the spokesperson for Fidelity told Elitsha that their guards got the instruction to strip search the workers from Mount Nelson’s security manager.

“Client gave the Fidelity officers instruction to do the search in his office. Fidelity conducted an internal investigation – polygraph tests and results indicated there were no deceptions from our employees,” said Hattingh. He confirmed that Fidelity is no longer a client of Mount Nelson hotel.

Case with HRC and CMMA

After the incident, the workers opened a case with the South African Human Rights Commission and with the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration with the help of their trade union. Leo Bottoman, the deputy secretary general of Independent Commercial Hospitality and Allied Workers Union (Ichawu), said that they wrote to the company to find out what happened but did not get a response.

“We wrote to the company after we spoke to our members and wanted to understand what was behind the unreasonable stripping of our members. We drew their attention to sections 12 and 13 of the constitution. We requested a meeting with them but we never got a response from them,” Bottoman said.

Bottoman alleges that the two workers were targeted by the company after the incident for standing up for their rights. They were eventually dismissed on allegations of theft. “They managed to paint them as thieves and got rid of them,” he said.