In Paris, the Eiffel Tower was closed on Monday September 7 due to a strike by employees, “shocked” by the eviction of female employees during the visit of a Hindu delegation on Saturday, on the sidelines of the inauguration of a temple near the French capital, we learned from staff and management.
In a press release sent by the CGT, the staff denounced “professional instructions which led to women employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex”.
Limit “interactions with women”
The Eiffel Tower Operating Company (Sete) acknowledged that the Hindu delegation had requested that the visit be organized by limiting “interactions with women” and admitted that “these conditions should not have been accepted”.
The Hindu delegation’s visit took place on the same day as a cultural boat procession on the Seine, organized by the Indian spiritual movement Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (Baps).
This organization, criticized as particularly conservative and nationalist by part of the Indian diaspora, dedicated its first major temple in France on Sunday, built in Bussy-Saint-Georges (Seine-et-Marne), 30 kilometers east of Paris.
Due to the anger of employees and their refusal to return to work, the Eiffel Tower remained closed all day Monday. On the monument’s website, a banner simply invoked a “delayed opening” for “operational reasons”.
“We are going to shed light on what happened”
“It is not acceptable that such conditions can be tolerated,” Emmanuel Grégoire, the mayor of Paris, wrote on X, promising that an investigation would be opened. “Equality between women and men will never stop at the foot of our historic monuments, nor at any place in this city.”
“I reaffirm the Eiffel Tower’s attachment to republican values, gender equality and respect for secularism,” reacted to AFP Ariel Weil, president of Sete and socialist mayor of Paris Center. He claimed that neither he nor the mayor of Paris were aware of this visit. “We will shed light on what happened and we will draw the consequences,” he added.
Management and elected staff members met on Monday. The Eiffel Tower will reopen under normal conditions on Tuesday morning, according to a Sete staff representative.
With AFP
