National Gallery employee: why I'm on strike over privatisation

This story was originally published anonymously on the Guardian Public Leaders network.

Like many of my colleagues, I got a job at the National Gallery because I love fine art and I want others to share my passion. With no disrespect to anyone, if I’d wanted to work for a private security company guarding office buildings, I’d have done that instead.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the gallery as a public institution. It rightly enjoys a worldwide must-visit reputation, and every year we calmly and professionally see six million people through our doors and into our beautiful rooms lined with priceless masterpieces. We are the second most visited major attraction in the country, behind only the British Museum.

To say I am proud to work there is putting it mildly, which is why I am on strike this week. Our senior managers announced last summer they want to hand us over to a private company that would take over all public-facing services, including the work of our assistants who sit in the rooms and help visitors, and those who arrange and run school trips and educational sessions. This came after we thought they had ruled out a sell-off on the basis that it was better to invest in their own staff.

Our managers want us to change our working patterns, to open at different hours and cover more events, to help it make up the budget shortfall it has suffered under this government’s short-sighted obsession with austerity that, in the case of the arts, amounts to nothing less than philistinism. We are open to change but obviously these things have to be negotiated properly; when our union representatives in the Public and Commercial Services union entered into lengthy talks, we thought we were making progress – until the gallery pulled the plug late last year.

Private security company CIS was used to cover the fantastic Rembrandt exhibition last autumn and we learned recently it has been handed the entire Sainsbury wing of the gallery for the rest of this year, without any competitive tender or consultation that you would expect for such a significant contract.

Again, I have nothing against CIS employees, but they have been told not to help visitors with enquiries. The Sainsbury wing is large and very popular, housing some Renaissance classics that people travel miles, sometimes crossing countries, to see. Dumping less experienced security guards in there, and telling them to refer visitors who ask about the Raphaels and Botticellis to other members of staff, will do nothing for the gallery’s standing.

In a deeply troubling development, one of the gallery’s trustees told the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee that CIS had been brought in to give staff like me “a fright”. What kind of employer treats its workforce in this way? It beggars belief.

Then, pouring fuel on an already tense dispute, we found out on Monday afternoon – just hours before the strike was due to start – that one of our senior representatives, a member of our negotiating team, had been suspended by senior managers. She was suspended pending an investigation after supplying information about the costs of using CIS to our full time union official – information that was fully available to staff.

This is a gross abuse of power by the gallery, and my colleagues and I are in no doubt that the intention is to threaten and bully us into submission. Well, it will not work.

We had already gathered almost 40,000 signatures on an online petition to stop the privatisation and we are now asking supporters to sign a statement calling for this rep’s suspension to be lifted and for our bosses to re-enter negotiation talks in good faith. Nothing else will do. The gallery, our jobs and the service we are proud to provide to art lovers, casual observers and excited tourists alike, are far too important to be thrown into the gutter by a penny-pinching government and a mean-spirited employer.