Hundreds of employees at the Louvre Museum went on strike on Monday, prompting its temporary closure and compounding a sense of crisis that began with the theft in October of crown jewels worth roughly $100 million.
Crowds of striking workers blocked the museum’s pyramid-shaped entrance Monday morning, after a daylong strike was called by roughly 400 of the museum’s 2,100 staff members. The strikers said they sought higher salaries, a bigger staff, better allocation of resources and a management that “truly listens to employees.”
The strike adds to a broader malaise engulfing the Louvre since the burglary in October, which exposed security, management and budgetary problems at one of the world’s most prestigious museums. Government investigators have since found that the museum’s current and previous leadership failed to enact security recommendations that could have hampered the heist, and misallocated resources by refurbishing exhibition spaces and acquiring new art instead of paying for repairs.
Now, the museum’s workers are citing some of these concerns to help justify their decision to take industrial action. In a letter warning of its strike plans last week, union leaders said the museum’s workers “feel that they are now the last line of defense before collapse.” The letter noted how “the various internal warnings have gone unheeded,” and accused the museum management of failing to create “sufficient awareness of the crisis we are facing.”
Protesting outside the museum on Monday, Vanessa Michaut-Valora, a union leader and museum guard, said “the break-in revealed to the world all of the dysfunction.”
The museum management did not respond to a request for comment on the strikers’ accusations.
