Eiffel Tower staff walk out after women were moved for a BAPS visit

The Eiffel Tower shut on Monday after staff struck over the way female employees were treated during a private visit on Saturday by a delegation of Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, the Gujarat-based Hindu organisation known as BAPS. The tower reopened on Tuesday. The argument did not.

Diane Davoine, speaking for the CGT union that represents workers at the monument, said women were told to leave their posts so that men could take them as a group of about 100 visitors moved through. Some women were sent to other areas. All female staff, she said, were told not to cross certain zones while the delegation was present. “It is a humiliating experience for the women, to be made invisible in a public space, even more so at a national symbol like the Eiffel Tower,” she said.

What the operator accepted

Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, the company that runs the tower, said the delegation had asked for the visit of a Hindu spiritual leader to be arranged so that his contact with women was limited. SETE then said those conditions “should not have been accepted.” Management has apologised to staff. Davoine said the apology did not settle the room. Workers met on Monday first to talk to management and second to make sure, in her words, that women are never treated that way at the company again.

BAPS monks take vows of celibacy that, on the organisation's own description, restrict speech and contact with women. The group was in Paris for the opening of a temple. The visitor named in Indian reporting was Mahant Swami Maharaj, the current spiritual head. A private tour of a public monument is a courtesy. Asking the monument to clear women from the route is a condition. SETE accepted the condition on Saturday and repudiated it on Monday.

French politicians across several parties criticised the arrangement. The CGT called it a workplace instruction that sidelined women on the basis of sex. The tower is owned by the City of Paris and run by SETE. That split matters. A city-owned site applied a guest's rule to its own staff.

A closed tower and an open rule

Monday's strike was short. Tourists found a delayed opening and a sign that blamed operational reasons. By Tuesday the lifts were running. The staff demand is not about one Saturday. It is about whether a future private visit can again write gender into the rota.

BAPS has apologised for the trouble the request caused. The group has not said it will drop the underlying rule when its monks travel. SETE has not published a written protocol for the next religious or state visit. Until one of those two documents exists, the next delegation that asks for a cleared corridor will test the same point.

The Eiffel Tower is a workplace with a large female staff and a public that assumes the people selling tickets and running lifts are part of the building. Saturday made some of those people step back so that a guest would not see them. Monday they stopped the building instead.