Paris Looks To Profit From Toilets

PARIS — “Dames pipi,” as the women who clean public toilets here are known, have been a fixture of Parisian neighborhoods since the days when many buildings lacked indoor plumbing.

Such was their prominence that, as the French essayist Claude Lussac notes, one dame pipi became the subject of a brief character sketch in Marcel Proust’s novel “Remembrance of Things Past.” Mr. Lussac recalled Proust’s character as comporting herself in her toilet like “a marquise in her salon, opening the little stalls and speaking with the customers, who shared confidences with her.”

Today, the dames pipi number barely a dozen, mostly older women who are immigrants from places like Guinea, Togo and Vietnam. And, unless they win a lawsuit to get back their jobs, they will be a casualty of the city’s effort to turn the public bathrooms into moneymaking ventures.

This summer, the city government contracted with the French subsidiary of a toilet company based in the Netherlands with the name 2theloo.

The women who once tended the free toilets have not been given jobs in the redone lavatories.

“The work was hard, but it was my job” said Pham Tai Doa, 65, who has worked as a dame pipi for 15 of the 25 years since she arrived in France from Vietnam.

With her comrades, Ms. Doa now spends part of every day at a protest a few meters from the now- shuttered toilet she once cleaned at the foot of the SacréCoeur Basilica that sits atop the Montmartre neighborhood.

The new toilets that have opened near the Louvre, which sell toilet paper in neon orange and fuchsia colors, cost 1.50 euros, or about $1.70, for each use.

According to Sarivo’s lawyer, Paul Coeffard, the women do not have the qualifications to care for the upgraded public toilets.

He said the people who work for Sarivo are “salespeople who must be up on the rules of French elegance and also the rules of elegance for foreign clients.”

But the dames pipi say they believe they are being pushed out because they are older women, are unglamorous and belong to a union. With the help of their union, Force Ouvrière, they are suing for two months’ back pay — the time since they were notified they had been let go — and the reinstatement of their jobs.

“There were the regulars, who were nice with us, who knew us,” said Gabrielle Adams, a Togolese cleaner who worked for 29 years in the Paris toilets. She recalled how much she had loved her post at the Church of the Madeleine.

“The mosaics, Art Deco, the windows, it was all so beautiful,” she said. “The tourists would come and they would not leave without photographing it.”