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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