Culture workers will demonstrate in front of the ministry headquarters on June 28

A demonstration of female cultural workers in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture in Rome, Via del Collegio Romano. It will be held on Monday, June 28 at 12 p.m. and is being organized by the association Mi Riconosci, which has been denouncing working conditions in the cultural sector since 2015. The demonstration has received the support of several labor organizations: UCLAS, UILpa, and COBAS Private Labor. The demonstration, organizers point out, aims to give voice to the demands and needs of those working in cultural spaces.

Professional figures working in public cultural institutions will participate in the event, but not only. In fact, there will also be bookshop and ticket office workers, educational workers and security guards, i.e., professional figures who ensure the smooth operation of so-called “additional” services, which, however, have very little additional, as they are indispensable for the fulfillment of the functions of a museum. The June 28 mobilization, organizers emphasize, will be a first day of struggle: the number of museums where people are losing their jobs is now exorbitant; wages are increasingly being lowered, reaching in some cases as low as 4 euros per hour; concessions are being renewed by way of exception, bordering on legality, favoring only private concessionaires and never enriching the state in terms of either economics or services. Inequalities are increasing, both in wages and rights and in access to cultural spaces, and the Ministry is not showing any way to address the problem.

“We warmly welcomed the request to take to the streets that came to us from a strong and determined group of workers at state museums such as Palazzo Barberini in Rome and the Ostia Antica Archaeological Park, the MArTA in Taranto, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the Reggia di Caserta,” says Daniela Pietrangelo, Mi Riconosci activist and museum educator, “because we believe it is vitally important to demonstrate and tell the story in our cities about those issues in the cultural sector that endanger the lives of those who work in it and the resilience of our democracy.”

“After twenty years of work, I and my 23 colleagues, outsourced staff of Apulian museum sites,” says Grazia Maremonti, “a former worker in the ticket office and bookshop at the National Archaeological Museum in Taranto, ”have been left at home and our rights have been trampled on. We have always guaranteed a very high quality service, in collaboration with Ministry staff, but our company has discontinued services and our activities have been replaced by an app for managing the ticket office."

“We are taking to the streets because there is a need to chart the future of this sector,” the organizers conclude, “a future that is different from the daily exploitation we experience and that cannot be separated from a serious program of stabilization of those who work and the creation of a National Cultural System that offers cultural services and quality work.”

Culture workers will demonstrate in front of the ministry headquarters on June 28

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