[EN IMAGES] Marseille train station has been turned into a landfill by a cleaners strike

On the eighth day of a strike by cleaners demanding wage increases and job guarantees, rubbish is piling up at Marseille’s Saint-Charles train station and in the aisles of the metro, a journalist told the newspaper on Tuesday. AFP.

“We are called invisible. Well there, see you,” said Abdeleza Salmi, Cleanliness Officer for the Metropolitan Transport Network (RTM), pointing to the overflowing garbage cans and the heaps of rubbish among which tourists and residents of France’s second largest city find themselves.

When they do not have exactly the same requirements, the cleaners in these two places focus their complaints on their common employer, the private company Laser Propreté, to which SNCF and RTM subcontract the cleaning.

AFP

Metro’s cleanliness officers accuse Laser Propreté of wage deductions.

“Little by little, we started checking our payslips and found that there were discrepancies,” said one striker, who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Another of his colleagues claimed that his salary had recently been reduced by 250 euros.

The company Laser could not be reached.

AFP

In general, all strikers are demanding more consideration for their “dirty”, “difficult” and “sometimes dangerous” work.

Your colleagues at the Saint-Charles train station fear for their 31 jobs. They fear that the next time the cleaning company calls for tenders in 2026, the SNCF will call on an association that is not affiliated with the cleaning collective agreement. The SNCF had done this in 2022 at the Aix-en-Provence station.

At the request of AFP, the SNCF indicated that “no action has yet been taken” regarding the next procurement, adding that “the public procurement rules will of course be strictly observed”.

AFP

For its part, the RTM, in a press release on Tuesday, assessed that, like its customers, it was “victim of a movement that is beyond their borders” and assured “to take all possible measures together with its service provider to ensure a return to normality to reach”. be effective in the coming hours.