The cleaners of the Guggenheim museum denounce the salary gap and days of up to 52 hours per week

The Cleaning workers at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, on strike for 223 days, have held a vindictive demonstration in which they have demanded that the existing wage gap in the sector be ended and have denounced “unbearable workloads” for which the employees are “forced to work more 48 hours a week” compared to the 35 established by agreement to replace their partners. Thus, they have asked for more staff to be hired.

The march, which was joined by workers from other areas, started from the Bizkaia Provincial Council Palace and, after passing through Plaza Moyúa, headed towards the museum, on whose esplanade the cleaners performed a karaoke to denounce precariousness.

A representative of the ELA union has denounced the precariousness in this group and has given several examples as proof of this: the salaries received by these employees, which take as a reference the Provincial Cleaning Agreement of Bizkaia, does not include salary increases for “many years” and there are workers “who do not work full-time and whose salaries do not reach 600 euros per month”, while those who are hired full-time have a base salary that “does not exceed 1000 euros“.

ELA has recalled that the group of cleaning workers demands that the wage gap of gender in Euskadi, which means that workers, mostly men, who carry out street or road cleaning have a salary that is 10,000 euros higher than the salary of women who carry out cleaning work.

The workday that governs by agreement for these employees is established at 35 hours per week, despite which in some weeks the group works “between 49 and 52 hours in a row”, assured the union representative, who has insisted that the weekly workday “would have to be 35 hours” but the employees are “forced to work more than 48 hours in a week”, for which he has defended the need to hire more staff.

Demonstration and karaoke to denounce the violation of the right to strike of the cleaners of the Guggenheimhttps://t.co/YGqfrSwU58 pic.twitter.com/2zlIzBs2fi

– ELA union #ActivateGetCare (@ELASyndicate) January 19, 2022

The workers of the Guggenheim cleaning service celebrate 223 days of strike this Wednesday, although, according to the union, neither the museum, nor the winning company Ferrovial Servicios, nor the Biscayan Provincial Council, the Basque Government and the Bilbao City Council, recognize the wage gap suffered by the workforce, while the company “continues violating the right to strike of the female employees, substituting those who exercise their right to strike, and cleaning the interior areas that correspond to the personnel on strike.

In addition, the Guggenheim Museum, together with the Bilbao City Council, “is using own machinery of the Bilbao Consistory to carry out outside work that corresponds to the personnel on strike”.