Waste is accumulating at Marseille's Saint-Charles station and in the corridors of the metro, on the eighth day of a strike by cleaners demanding salary increases and guarantees on employment, an AFP journalist found Tuesday. "We are called the invisible. Well, we can be seen," said Abdeleza Salmi, a cleaner at the Réseau de Transport Métropolitain (RTM), pointing to the overflowing garbage cans and piles of waste between which tourists and residents of the second city of France circulate.
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If they do not share exactly the same demands, the cleaners of these two places focus their grievances against their common employer, the private company Laser Propreté to which SNCF and RTM subcontract cleaning. The cleaning agents of the metro accuse Laser Propreté of practicing deductions from wages. "Little by little, we started to consult our payslips, we found that there were discrepancies," said 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.
"Dirty" work
In general, all strikers demand more consideration for their "dirty", "difficult" and "sometimes dangerous" work. Their colleagues working at Gare Saint-Charles 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 an association that is not attached to the collective agreement of cleanliness. The SNCF had done so at the Aix-en-Provence station in 2022. Questioned by AFP, the SNCF said that "no steps have yet been taken" with regard to the next award of the contract, adding that "the rules of public procurement will of course be strictly respected".