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Their ranks diminished rapidly as the copropriétaire
system of ownership grew in France. The transformation of entire
blocks of buildings from rental units to individually owned apartments
occurred with more and more frequency as the 1970s progressed. Paris
still had many cracked and crumbling old buildings without modern
comforts under the Loi de 48 which kept rents artificially low.
Inevitably, real estate speculators appeared, bought the buildings
at bargain basement prices, renovated them, and resold them one
apartment at a time. All over Paris tenants were slowly replaced
by owners with different priorities.
"Copropriétaires think that everything is allowed because
they are owners," explained Colette Laberdoulive. "Tenants
are different. Before I was in a building where every time I did
a favor for one of the tenants they would give me a little something—I
was even embarrassed. Here I don’t get so much as a thank you."
It was 6am on a Saturday. Laberdoulive was untangling a bright yellow
garden hose in front of a sleeping building in the fashionable 16th
arrondissement—the arrondissement with the largest concentration
of concierges in the city.
The Paris sky was still dark. Not a window on the block was lit.
On the corner a taxi discharged four passengers, dressed in evening
clothes, just now coming home. Laberdoulive had already cleaned
the staircases and the hall. She connected the hose and methodically
began washing dried autumn leaves from the sidewalk. "When
the boulangeries open around seven, I’ve already almost finished
all the cleaning," she said, as a jet of water sprayed the
last stubborn leaves into the street. "The walk is something
extra. It’s not part of my duties."
The tasks a concierge is required to perform are clearly spelled
out in her contract. It dictates how many times she must wash the
stairs each week and distribute the mail each day. The type and
frequency of her duties determine her pay. A typical concierge with
a 39 apartment building only earns 3980.46F per month. But her day
to day work involves much more than what the contract specifies.
It’s the innumerable little things she does here and there
that make her indispensable. Of course, the concierge can be nosy,
sometimes a little too much, and she gossips, sometimes a little
too much, but she is always there willing to do a favor.
Every morning Laberdoulive cleans the halls on each floor, and the
main entrance including the glass door and the wall length mirror.
She polishes all the building’s copper regularly, distributes
the mail three times a day, takes out the garbage at night and puts
the containers back in their place every morning. In short, she
is responsible for everything in the building’s common areas.
This is her job as the contract describes it. This is what the copropriétaires
and the syndic, who manages the property, consider when they compare
the cost effectiveness of their concierge to the alternatives. The
problem is that this description doesn’t count the things Laberdoulive
does that aren’t specified in the contract—the kind of
things that are only noticed if they’re left undone. Laberdoulive
paused in the building’s subterranean car park. "Look
at the garage," she said, pointing to the clean, well-lit space
full of late-model BMWs and Mercedes. "It’s not part of
the common area. I sweep it once a week. Do you think they notice?"
Ready to tackle the basement, Laberdoulive entered an underground
labyrinth where she knows every corner—she’s been cleaning
it for 25 years. Using her broom, she sprinkled a few drops of water
on the floor to keep the dust from rising as she swept it into little
piles. She worked quickly, with deliberate movements that conserve
time and energy. Shaking a bit of dust from her broom she said off-handedly,
"The woman next door has a dirt floor in her cellar. She can’t
even sweep it. I don’t know if she has rats, but I wouldn’t
be at all surprised if she did."
Bucket in her left hand, broom in her right, Laberdoulive walked
slowly, almost waddling on legs stiff from arthritis. Finished with
her morning work, she could rest until the first mail arrives. Another
gray morning sky was breaking over Paris. It was 7:30am.
"They use the pretext that I have a good apartment to make
me do more than everything," explained Laberdoulive who lives
with her daughter in a two room apartment—an unusually good
lodging for a concierge. "They would really like it if I left."
Getting rid of the concierge is not difficult. According to Patrick
Barbero, Directeur du Service Juridique of the UDGE, when an employer
wants the gardienne to leave, all he has to do is call her in and
give her three months notice. After that she must cease her functions
and return the keys. For the unfortunate concierge who’s lost
her work, the loss is doubled because her apartment is automatically
reclaimed. The country’s economic situation provides a handy
pretext for copropriétaires or syndics who think they can
economize by replacing their gardienne with a digicode and a cleaning
service. But a concierge can’t be replaced so easily.
"When there’s a gardienne, there’s life in a building—always
someone there to say "Hello." A building without a concierge
is dead. Dead," explained Custodia Perreira emphatically. Perreira
is the concierge of a building in Boulogne. During twelve years
of loyal service, everyone was satisfied—the tenants and Perreira.
"For me it was almost like a family. I love my work,"
she continued. "Because I love the contact with people."
Always at home, the gardienne helps the building’s residents
in little ways. Perreira explained, "There was an older woman
who used to live here. Often she would come downstairs and then
realize she had forgotten her umbrella—I always lent her mine."
It’s this unique role the concierge plays in a building that
is most often overlooked.
Aware of everything that happens, she provides information in passing.
She knows the usual comings and goings of the building occupants
and is always ready to tell a friend who’s missed you when
you’re likely to be in. For old people, frequently living alone,
the gardienne is one of the rare remaining links with the larger
society of the quartier. The concierge also notices who goes in
and out. Break-ins and robberies don’t pass undetected easily
in her presence. A digicode is far from providing the same services.
Remembering the good old times when her building was occupied by
tenants, Perreira said wistfully, "Sometimes we even had lunch
together. Those were good people. People of another class. The people
now think about nothing but their money."
The building is full of copropriétaires now. They don’t
think about their concierge the way tenants did. Unaware of, or
unconcerned with, her proper function, they tend to regard her as
their hired domestic help, not as an employee of the building with
specific contractual obligations. Perreira recounted an experience
illustrative of their mentality. Shortly after the copropriétaires
began moving in, on a Saturday morning when she’d finished
with her cleaning, a group of workmen arrived to paint one of the
apartments at the request of the propriétaire. When they
left, they left a sloppy mess all over the hall. "It was the
propriétaire’s personal work inside her apartment. And
she demanded I re-wash everything immediately. I told her, ‘It’s
your workman who made the mess,’" said Perreira. "I
mean, I have rights too—even a dog would be treated better."
Perreira feels completely abandoned to her sad fate—the syndic
is trying to force her to leave by pressuring her to sign a new
contract that more than doubles her workload while freezing her
salary. Distraught, she turned to a new private union. But the organization
has so far been unable to help her. She knows that if she resigns
her post she won’t find another job because she is in her fifties,
and she will end up in the street without even the right to unemployment
benefits.
Her case is representative of the situation currently facing many
concierges in Paris. From far of provinces or other countries—Perreira
is Portuguese—they don’t always know their rights and
occasionally they’ve signed absurdly exploitative contracts.
Afraid to risk finding themselves in the street, only a small fraction
of those in trouble are willing to approach the unions that exist
to help them assert their rights.
When a gardienne is prepared to take the necessary steps, a strategy
must be found to ameliorate her conditions without putting her position
in jeopardy. On this kind of case by case basis, the unions are
often able to assist individual concierges. But on the collective
level, the unions can’t seem to stop the hemorrhaging of the
profession.
Increasingly, copropriétaires are finding concierges a luxury
they think they can no longer afford. The Syndicat des Employés
d’Immeubles de la Région Parisienne confronts these
situations on a daily basis. Bazile has no problem understanding
the economic constraints faced by copropriétaires required
to pay the "employer’s" tax which amounts to an additional
45% of a gardienne’s salary. "Still, in a big building,
the cost of the concierge is so little compared to the other charges—7%—but
they complain about the cost of the concierge," Bazile said,
exasperated. "When they want to get rid of the concierge, they
say it’s because of the economy, but it’s not. It’s
because they want to economize."
Fighting this short-sighted view of "saving" is difficult
because copropriétaires don’t realize exactly how much
a concierge brings to a building until long after she is gone. A
digicode never lends anyone an umbrella when it rains, and a cleaning
service doesn’t take the same pride in a building’s appearance
as the little woman in the flower-print dress who lives on the ground
floor. Paris is not a poor city and the passing of concierges is
not a symptom of economic trouble. The concierges are being pushed
from the Paris stage in the final act of a tragedy that began with
the disappearance of the popular quartiers—leaving the face
of the city without its soul.
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