Four famous French museums sued for disguised employment

Do the most prestigious French cultural establishments employ illegal labor? This Wednesday, October 16, three complaints were filed to this effect before the Paris Public Prosecutor and a fourth before the Marseille Public Prosecutor for “illicit loan of labor” and “bargaining”.

The Louvre Museum, the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the Parise-Pinault Collection Stock Exchange and the Mucem in Marseille are being blamed by Sud-Culture for their growing use of subcontracting. At the same time, the lawyers indicated that they had also contacted the Labor Inspectorate.

For several months, employees in the cultural sector have been mobilizing in the face of the precariousness of their status and their deteriorating working conditions. The Sud-Culture union therefore conducted a survey among employees of large French institutions. Over the months, “a common thread has emerged: that of a system which has developed in a good number of cultural establishments of the deviation of the principle of subcontracting”, he explains in a press release.

Excessive outsourcing

The organization denounces the fact that outsourcing has extended to almost all of the missions characteristic of a cultural establishment. “Initially limited to security, maintenance and cleaning services, it is now ticketing, cloakrooms, visitor reception, cultural mediation, guided tours and educational workshops which are subcontracted,” South point.

For the latter, “the stated objective” is to free the museums “constraints of managing logistical tasks” and of “compensate with the employment ceilings set by budgetary texts and the Ministry of Culture. (…) These employees are put in competition, in situations of precariousness and deterioration of their working conditions which must stop” denounces the union.

The Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, has indicated that it has “no information” regarding such complaint, and “never comment” a possible ongoing investigation. The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault and the Palais de la Porte Dorée did not respond to requests from AFP. As for the Mucem, the Marseille establishment believes that an outsourced service within the framework of public contracts makes it possible to “ensure that the service provider’s staff are not subordinate to Mucem staff” and that human resources issues “are processed directly by the service provider”, « sans intervention » of the museum.

For the plaintiffs’ lawyers, Me Thibault Laforcade, Juliette Bourgeois and Lucie Marius, “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”. Sud-Culture believes that this “outsourcing is a practice that has massively affected cultural establishments for several years: the Center Pompidou-Metz (2010), the Louvre-Lens
(2012), the Palais de Tokyo (2012), the MuCEM (2013) the Louis Vuitton Foundation (2014)…”