Glasgow Museum Staff Protest On Day 4 Of Strike

The Scotsman

Glasgow Museum Staff Protest On Day 4 Of Strike  Flagship Glasgow museums close as staff strike  At a glance  Two flagship Glasgow museums are closed as staff take strike action over plans to cut jobs  The Burrell Collection closed on Tuesday, as well as Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, which were also shut on Monday.  Unison, the union representing the staff, says job losses could have a detrimental impact on precious items in the museum collection  Glasgow Life, which runs Glasgow's museums, says it has to make savings because of the city council's budget deficit

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:05 [Shouting]

00:18 Thank you very much, thank you.

00:20 Thank you very much, cheers, thank you.

00:22 So my name is Elaine Addington, I'm a curator with the Open Museum,

00:26 which is the outreach service of Glasgow Museums,

00:28 and I'm also a member of UNISON.

00:30 I'm here because this is day four of a five-day strike.

00:34 Myself and my colleagues have come out because we're facing 30% cuts

00:39 of the back-of-house staff at Glasgow Museums.

00:42 It's so important that we raise awareness because the bulk of the staff

00:45 that are affected work behind the scenes,

00:47 so people don't really have a good handle on the work that they do

00:52 and how important it is and the major effect it's going to have when they're cut.

00:56 And we've also been down at the city chambers because there was a full council meeting there,

01:01 and what we're trying to do is encourage the people in power to come back

01:05 round the table and start talking to us again.

01:08 Hi, I'm Fiona Cairns, I'm a collections access assistant at Glasgow Museums,

01:12 and the reason we're striking is because we're looking at losing a third

01:16 of collections care and access staff.

01:19 The irony is we've actually been here before,

01:22 so Glasgow Museums lost a third of its staff in the late '90s,

01:26 and we went down to 328 staff.

01:30 So the first time we applied for HLF funding to refurbish Kelvin Grove,

01:35 we were told that the numbers were just far too low.

01:39 There was a best value review in 2001 that said 328 staff was disastrous

01:45 for the collection and visitors.

01:48 So a condition of HLF funding was to lift our numbers by 21,

01:53 so at that point we got up to about 350 staff.

01:57 Standing here today, Glasgow Museums only has 303 staff,

02:02 18 of those posts are vacant, and the workforce proposals we were presented with

02:07 takes the numbers down to 266.

02:11 So if 328 staff were catastrophic in 2001,

02:16 we just cannot do it with 266.

02:19 And we all need to bear in mind that today Glasgow Museums

02:23 counts staff from Special Collections and City Archives

02:27 who weren't counted in that 2001 number of 328,

02:31 so we can't manage.

02:33 So we're here because we're standing up for our jobs,

02:36 but we're also really standing up for this service

02:39 because we all passionately believe in it.

02:42 It belongs to the people of Glasgow.

02:44 It brings in tourists.

02:46 I've been speaking to tourists all week on the picket lines

02:49 who are really supportive of our cause, have come to Glasgow

02:53 just to visit Kelvin Grove for the day.

02:56 Our museums are an amazing resource and they belong to all of us.

03:01 So with these cuts, visitors will see dirty displays, broken displays.

03:08 We won't be able to rotate objects, to work with the public,

03:12 to work with community groups.

03:15 We're about to fall over, so this is why we've come out.

03:19 Striking was an absolute last resort,

03:22 but we want to defend the service at this point and we cannot do it.

03:27 We're a skeleton staff already and we just cannot absorb these cuts.

03:32 [Music plays]

03:38 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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