On Sunday, November 5, the doors of the Centre Pompidou in Paris were closed for the fifth time since the start of a strike that began on October 16. They were closed again on November 6, after a general meeting of staff at which the latest version of the memorandum of understanding negotiated between the unions and management was presented – the strike notice having been extended by a month. "The situation is bogged down, and we haven't yet found a way out," said the general secretary of the CFDT-Culture union, Alexis Fritche.
For weeks, staff have been demanding written guarantees of their future during the site's five-year closure between 2025 and 2030 for major works, including asbestos removal. The future is clear for the employees at the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (Public Information Library), who have found a new home in the Lumière building in the 12th arrondissement on Avenue des Terroirs-de-France, near Bercy Village, as well as for employees at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique-Musique (Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, IRCAM), who are not affected by the closure.
The situation is distinctly vague for the rest of the staff, who will be reassigned between the existing storage facilities in northern Paris; the new branch in Massy (Essonne), scheduled to open in summer 2026; and the Grand Palais, where, in 2025, the Centre Pompidou will be able to hold exhibitions in a space of some 2,800 square meters. "What we're proposing is exceptional and unique," said the center's president, Laurent Le Bon, during an audio press conference on October 24, and cited as a counterexample the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, "which will be closed for 14 years with no backup solutions."
Le Bon's complacent statement has done nothing to appease the unions. "With less than a year to go before the move begins in autumn 2024, people don't know where they're going, or under what conditions," said Philippe Mahé, secretary for Force Ouvrière (Worker's Force, one of France's five major labor federations) at the Centre Pompidou. "Our demands have been clear from the outset: that our payroll, status and bonuses are maintained and a guarantee that we will return to our jobs when we reopen."
Staff in the carpentry workshops and the mediation department fear that their jobs will ultimately be lost to outsourced providers. The Centre Pompidou's management has promised that "all staff who have permanent contracts and civil servants on the payroll at the time of the reopening will be reinstated in their jobs or in positions corresponding to their skills." "So why are they refusing to put into writing that there will be no outsourcing?" said Rose-Marie Stolberg, representing the Union Nationale des Syndicats Autonomes (National Union of Autonomous Trade Unions, UNSA).
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