Workers waving flags and holding flares staged a protest at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence behind a banner reading “Basta Vite Precarie” (No Move Precarious Lives).
As reported by the Art Newspaper, the protest in the Piazzale degli Uffizi was convened after some temporary workers at the museum—assigned to roles in security, reception, ticketing, the bookshop, and the coatroom—lost their jobs following a change in service providers at the institution last fall. That raised the ire of the trade union Sudd Cobas, which organized the protest and wrote on Instagram: “New Year’s resolution: continue working together with the workers of the Uffizi Galleries. What’s at stake is a different idea of work, of the city, of culture.”
An earlier post by Sudd Cobas said that “many citizens also joined [the workers], clearly understanding that the struggle of these workers concerns the entire city: Florence’s tourism economy cannot continue to be based on low-wage and precarious work.”
The union also claimed that “the working conditions of permanent employees have also worsened following the last change of contract. It is necessary to completely overcome the model under which the contracts for Florentine museums have been managed for the last twenty years, a model that has produced an army of precarious workers and created a division between ‘first-class’ and ‘second-class’ workers who perform the same tasks with different contracts and salaries.”
According to TAN, the change that led to the protest related to the Uffizi leaving Opera Laboratori Fiorentini, a company that managed ticketing, surveillance, and hospitality services at the museum since 2006, for CoopCulture, after which employees on permanent contracts retained their jobs but others with temporary arrangements were not rehired. The new company told TAN that it had updated employment arrangements “in full compliance with the provisions of the tender notice, which included a list of workers for whom continuity of employment had to be guaranteed.” Other workers with temporary contracts “were not included in the procedure and are therefore not linked to the new concession.”
Union representatives and affected workers are expected to meet soon with Florence’s deputy mayor for labor. A spokesperson for the Uffizi told TAN that, as a state-run institution, the museum cannot directly employ staff and must rely on tenders, adding “For seasonal or temporary workers not retained by the new concessionaire, the museum can only exert moral suasion.”
