Pompeii, ticket office workers without layoff for months: we call for internalization

It will be a Christmas without money for ticket office workers at Pompeii Archaeological Park and Herculaneum Archaeological Park. The two archaeological sites have outsourced their external ticketing and public reception services to private individuals since 2000 (today they are managed by the company Opera Laboratori Fiorentini), and with the government-established closure of the museums, they have all found themselves at home: hired employees can avail themselves of the redundancy scheme provided by current legislation, but the workers are complaining of three months of arrears because no checks have been arriving from the state, and this since September. Thus, yesterday park workers went to protest under the Inps headquarters in Naples.

Now, given that, moreover, concessions are renewed every four years and workers complain about the uncertainty that comes with each renewal (since if the concessionaire loses the contract, workers could run the risk of finding themselves without their jobs), the employees who protested yesterday in the Campania capital are demanding to be hired by the civil service. “We are asking once and for all for internalization,” said Luigi Napolitano, union head of the Private Labor Cobas. “We appeal to Franceschini to establish a criterion of justice. For 20 years we have been managing tourist flows for the excavations of Pompeii alone of four million visitors a year, for sixteen euros per ticket. We have earned the state and businesses billions of euros over these 20 years. And we in these years have given our souls for the excavations of Pompeii, forty degrees in the shade in summer, below zero in winter, information offices, reception, ticketing: without us millions of tourists would not have been able to enjoy these archaeological sites. And now we have been repaid with total abandonment, we have to wait for the biblical times of the Inps, they have halved our salaries since last lockdown for three months on return. We have to wait an average of four or five months to get supplementation, we have families, we have children, and this is not fair.”

The Cobas now announce that if the situation lasts, the next garrison will be held in Rome in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In the meantime, the Inps has promised that by early January, the layoff fund for September, October and November will be disbursed to those entitled to it.

Pictured is a moment of the protest.

Pompeii, ticket office workers without layoff for months: we call for internalization

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