Waste is accumulating at Saint-Charles station in Marseille and in the corridors of the metro, on the eighth day of a strike by cleaning agents demanding wage increases and job guarantees.
“They call us invisible. Well there, we can see us, ”welcomed Abdeleza Salmi, cleanliness officer within the Metropolitan Transport Network (RTM), pointing to the overflowing garbage cans and the piles of waste between which tourists and inhabitants of the second city in France.
Salary mismatches
If they do not share exactly the same claims, the cleaning agents of these two places concentrate their grievances towards their common employer, the private company Laser Propreté to which the SNCF and the RTM subcontract the cleaning.
Metro cleanliness officers accuse Laser Propreté of making deductions from wages. “Little by little, we started to consult our payslips, we noticed that there were discrepancies”, declared a striker who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. Another of his colleagues claimed to have recently had his salary cut by 250 euros. The Laser company could not be reached.
Concern about the next call for tenders
In general, all strikers demand more consideration for their “dirty”, “difficult” and “sometimes dangerous” work. Their colleagues working at the Saint-Charles station are worried about their 31 jobs. They fear that during the next call for tenders for the cleaning company, scheduled for 2026, the SNCF will then call on a company that is not attached to the collective cleaning agreement. The SNCF had done so at Aix-en-Provence station in 2022.
Asked by AFP, the SNCF indicated that “no action has yet been taken” with regard to the next award of the contract, adding that “the rules of public contracts will of course be strictly respected”.