The SUD-Culture union filed a complaint this week against four museums including the Louvre, denouncing the “illegal” outsourcing of salaried tasks entrusted to private companies, AFP learned Thursday from a source close to the matter.
According to this source, these complaints, mentioned by Libération, were sent by mail on Wednesday.
In addition to the most visited museum in the world (8.9 million visitors in 2023), two other complaints filed in Paris target the Bourse de commerce-Pinault Collection and the Palais de la Porte Dorée, while a complaint targets Marseille. Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem).
Contacted, Le Louvre indicated that it had “no information” regarding such a complaint, and “never comment on an ongoing investigation, if this were to be the case”.
Asked by AFP, the Mucem notably responded that an internal organization made it possible to “ensure that the service provider’s staff are not subordinate to Mucem staff” and that human resources issues “are handled directly by the service provider”, “without intervention” from the Mucem.
The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault and the Palais de la Porte Dorée did not wish to comment, and the three private companies involved did not respond to AFP.
The process denounced by the complainants is the same each time: these museums are accused of having issued calls for tenders relating to various services (reception, mediation in the room, sales, cloakroom, management of audio guides, etc.) for which private companies provide employees. On paper, this labor loan is perfectly legal.
But according to the complainants, it becomes illegal in the case of these museums because “the loaned employees are in reality directly subordinated to the teams” of the museums, are “treated differently from internal agents” with working conditions which would be less good. , and that the loan would ultimately be “exclusively for profit”.
They recall that “this outsourcing mechanism has often been put in place by public cultural establishments to compensate for the employment ceilings set by budgetary texts and the Ministry of Culture”, “has massively affected cultural establishments for several years” and generates “deleterious effects”.
“The initiation of these legal actions aims to ensure that justice finally takes up this illegal circumvention of the texts and employment ceilings by museums and their co-contractors” the plaintiffs’ lawyers commented for AFP , Me Thibault Laforcade, Juliette Bourgeois and Lucie Marius.
“It is also a way for employees in the cultural sector, who are experiencing increasingly harsh job insecurity, to say with dignity that this must stop because the repercussions on their daily lives have become untenable,” according to them.
