Paris toilet ladies suffer setback in 'wrongful dismissal' case

The last practitioners of an ancient Paris profession - female toilet attendants - have been dealt a major setback in the fight to keep their time-honoured job alive.

For the last three months 11 "dames pipi" - or pee ladies - have been protesting outside public loos next to tourist attractions like Notre-Dame Cathedral and Montmartre.

The ladies - some of whom have been cleaning Paris toilets for more than 30 years - were dismissed after a Dutch "toilet concept" company won the contract to manage the city's last "manned" loos.

But now a Paris labour court has said there are no grounds to grant the ladies an immediate hearing - meaning that the case risks dragging on for months without the prospect of reinstatement.

The decision was welcomed by the lawyer representing the Dutch company 2theloo, external, Paul Coeffard, who said "it reflects what we have argued from the start".

2theloo, which runs loos in 13 countries, says it offers much more than just the normal lavatory experience.

In the court hearing, Coeffard said employees were expected to "accompany customers to the stalls; speak several languages; and sell items of toiletry like paper-rolls and tooth-brushes".

2theloo's case is that the nature of the job having changed, it was not obliged to take on the former "dames pipi" - whose expertise lies in traditional cleaning.

However, the ladies - and their union - argued that it is ridiculous to pretend the job of toilet attendant has turned into that of a kind of salesperson, simply on the say-so of a "concept" company.

When I visited the public loos beside Notre Dame cathedral - which are now managed by 2theloo - the new staff were selling coloured toilet rolls at the exorbitant price of 10 euros a roll. But other than that, it was a conventional public loo.

"Look: it is the same tourists coming here. They are doing their business in the same way. And the staff has to clean in the same old way," said Malamine Ndiaye of the Force Ouvriere (FO) union, external.

"But the ladies who were here have been thrown on the scrapheap just because they don't speak foreign languages."

One of the ladies, Gabrielle Adam, 62, told me: "I have been cleaning the lavatories since 1986. It is a perfectly honourable profession even if it does mean washing up people's pee and sick. But now I have been discarded like an old rag."

According to the FO, a labour convention should have applied under which the ladies were automatically taken on by the new employer.

Paris used to have hundreds of "dames pipi" managing its public loos, but they have steadily been replaced by automatic self-cleaning street booths.