A long dozen tents placed at the Puerta de Jerez, in the heart of Seville, attract the attention of tourists and passers-by who pass by the busy Avenida de la Constitución in the direction of the Palacio de San Telmo or the Torre del Oro. Those who stop and observe the signs with which they are adorned understand the reason. “Cleaning our schools is not a business. It is a right,” it reads. The point is that they have been fighting for months against the City Council’s privatization plan, on whom this service depends. They allege that this decision will cause the dismissal of many of them and they want their proposals to be heeded, which involves the money from the tender, 25 million, being used to strengthen and improve their working conditions. They assure that even less than the tender money would be enough. “Four million would be enough to cover the vacancies.”
At mid-morning on Monday, the first day of the camp, those who are handing out pamphlets explaining their demands – translated into English so that foreign visitors also understand the reason for the camp – are the representatives of the unions, who, together with the families of the majority of the public schools, have dedicated themselves to the cleaners. The public employees will arrive in the afternoon, when their work shifts end, and will spend the night there in the hope that the mayor, the popular José Luis Sanz, will vary some plans, which, however, seem firm. “He wants to manage a problem with privatization when the school management itself, the Ampa and almost the entire citizenry, are telling him that he is making a mistake by privatizing cleaning services,” says Jorge Menacho, the general secretary of CC OO, which together with UGT, CSIF and USO, supports the cleaners.
After the first night, the cleaners wake up in the square surrounded by the first tourists. At six o’clock some were already up to go to their school at eight o’clock and start their shift. Others enter at one o’clock and remain in the camp surrounded by UGT members, who have arrived to relieve them. “It has been uncomfortable to sleep on the mattresses,” says one of them, although, in general, they prefer not to complain about the cold or the discomfort, because their purpose is much more important to them. “We have spent our entire lives studying competitive examinations to get here, so that now they give us a kick,” says Lola Jiménez, one of the twenty cleaners who have spent the night in the center of the capital. She is close to turning sixty and this year she had managed to obtain the necessary points to qualify for a permanent position.
Although they had planned to camp until March 11, mid-morning this Tuesday, two police officers warned them that they must evacuate because they do not have authorization to occupy public roads. The cleaners are going to put up the tents, but they do not plan to give up. “They are not going to throw us out so easily,” says María José Ramos. Their intention is to stay in public banks to continue claiming their rights.
Her words, like those of the rest of her colleagues, are impregnated with helplessness and frustration after having dedicated so many years of work and study to be public employees and realizing that now it is possible that, with privatization, they will not be replaced in their jobs. “We have fought to work here and that is why we have prepared for the exams, not to enter a private company,” says Carmen Picón, cleaner at the Adult Permanent Education Center in Polígono Sur.
The cleaners have been the main witnesses of the degradation of the service, a problem that has not been resolved in recent years and whose solution, for the City Council, has been through privatization. Carmen Portillo, an employee at a school in Triana, states that “he was the one who let him die.” [José Luis Sanz]. It has not filled the vacancies and has not provided the appropriate materials to be able to say that the service does not work and have the excuse of privatizing.” All of them have been carrying out the work for months, prioritizing the disinfection of the areas where the children are. “We are running and that is why there are so many casualties. “You cannot do the work of three people alone and cover everything,” says Jiménez. And he warns that they do not intend to stop their demands for their rights: “We are going to fight until the end because it has cost us a lot of sacrifice to get to where we are and now we are not going to lose everything.”
The councilor insists that the conflict “has no basis” and continues to defend that with privatization “the cleaning of the 108 schools in the city will be reinforced” and that the 645 cleaning workers who are currently hired by the council “will continue doing the same.” The City Council defends that with the new winning company there will be an increase of another 106 to which, it maintains, another 300 who hire the entity will be added. It is the same argument that Sanz offered last Thursday in the municipal plenary session, which, precisely, was interrupted up to four times by cleaners who asked to be heard.
These municipal employees, like the unions, warn that the increase of 106 workers is nothing more than vacancies that remain to be filled and denounce that the workforce is currently understaffed, another reality that Ampa corroborates. Representatives of workers’ organizations also denounce that the mayor broke off negotiations to find a solution to the entrenched problem of cleaning public schools, something that Sanz also denied in plenary session. “We have made a series of proposals, but the mayor has not even wanted to evaluate them,” the secretary of the Csif Union Section, Rafael Román, told this newspaper.
With posters that read: “Destroyer of public affairs, mayor of Seville, student of Juanma Moreno” and “Mayor throws 300 families onto the streets. Does not take care of school children,” the union organizations intend to draw attention to this situation on the street. The fact that they cannot camp on the street does not diminish the strength of their claims. The cleaners will be at the Parliament of Andalusia on Thursday, where the full control of the Junta Government is being held, to convey their demands and their fear of the future to the Andalusian president.
