“Staff at all sites across National Museum Wales have been out on continuous strike action for over two weeks now, following a dispute of over 2 years about a cut of 15% to the take home pay of the lowest paid for their weekend work – while senior managers face no cuts at all. The support we’ve had so far has been phenomenal, but there’s still lots of people who aren’t aware of the situation.” Check out the Facebook page here if you would like to know more.
I joined the strikers on the picket line outside the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea this morning and did a bit of scribbling into my sketchbook. The affected staff are those in the front-of-house, the ones that make museum visits special for visitors, the ones who make the museum service work for the public. They’re also the lowest paid and in this rotten travesty of a society we have at the moment, they’re the ones who are expected to take a pay cut – not the ones at the top of the tree – oh no! Sound familiar?
And our rotten biased Anglocentric national media doesn’t want to know. This is happening right across Wales but it’s too much to expect lazy media hacks to get off their backsides and travel out of London once in a while to see what’s happening in the rest of Britain.
scribblah 
Reblogged this on Art History blog and commented:
More and more action by workers are beginning to oppose Pro austerity moves thanks for that Laurence
Funny how the arts are the easy target for cutbacks. In Oz our conservative government has continued to cut back public institutions across the country and lower the wages of people working in them. Here the governments favourite measure is the ‘efficiency dividend ‘, ie they keep taking a % off the top of the organisation’s budget on the basis of some economically miraculous event that each year you will become more efficient so you won’t need so much money! At least when the government cut funding from 60 arts organisations last week it did make the national news.
It seems to be a widespread phenomenon unfortunately 😦