Paris (AFP)

Will the start of the school year necessarily be masked in companies? Joining recent calls made by several infectious diseases, the Ministry of Labor is to announce Tuesday to the social partners that it is considering the "compulsory wearing of a mask" and recommends teleworking.

Élisabeth Borne, the Minister of Labor, announced the color on Sunday in the JDD: she envisages the "compulsory wearing of the mask" in certain situations, such as meeting rooms and business circulation spaces.

After exchanging with the employers and the unions at the end of last week, the minister must present Tuesday morning, during a meeting by videoconference, the measures likely to be applied at the start of the school year.

The ministry also asked the High Council of Public Health to work on "open space". The latest version of the deconfinement protocol in companies, a practical guide to dealing with the health crisis, dates back to early August but in reality the last big update dates back to the end of June.

Since that date, the French who can have gone on vacation, and the coronavirus has continued to circulate.

The statistical indicators of contamination have started to rise again and worry the health authorities and the government, who fear a second wave likely to rock again the hospital system and the economy.

Faced with the obligations to wear the mask outside taken in certain cities, such as Paris and Marseille, several doctors are campaigning for the mask to become compulsory in closed spaces that are companies.

Protocols for workplaces "do not sufficiently take into account" the risk of the spread of Covid-19 by aerosols (fine droplets suspended in the air exhaled by patients), as about twenty doctors lamented in a column published online by Liberation.

- "The question is who pays?" -

"If the mask is compulsory, as personal protective equipment, it is the responsibility of the companies", explains to AFP Michel Beaugas, an executive of the FO union, who is in favor of it in principle. “The question is the cost and who pays?” He sums up.

“There are also questions in terms of work organization, working time and work premises,” adds Véronique Martin of the CGT.

According to the latest figures published by Public Health France, 24% of "clusters", sources of contamination, are located in companies (excluding medical establishments). "According to the figures presented to us, half of the business clusters are slaughterhouses or farms," ​​explained Michel Beaugas.

Thus at the beginning of summer, the coronavirus circulated among seasonal agricultural workers in Provence but also in Mayenne via slaughterhouses.

For more traditional office activities, Élisabeth Borne sees "no reason" to question the current rule "imposing one square meter per workstation, a rule established at the end of June, nor to impose the mask" in individual offices ".

For the president of the CPME (Confederation of small and medium-sized enterprises), François Asselin, "it is common sense".

"If you are all alone in your workspace, why require you to wear a mask? On the other hand, if you leave your workspace and take a corridor or a meeting room where there are people, this asking you to wear a mask is okay.

The executive is on "a crest line that is not easy to hold," he told AFP, because "you have to have a sensitization message" and "at the same time avoid sending too anxiety-provoking messages which would seize up the activity that everyone needs ".

Also of course on the menu Tuesday, the issue of teleworking, which "remains recommended" especially in "areas of active circulation of the virus", has already warned the minister.

For their part, the unions, as Michel Beaugas reminds us, impatiently await a negotiation to open on this subject with the employers but the latter is opposed to it.

© 2020 AFP