Civil servants: the wage standoff continues on Tuesday in the streets

Europe 1 with AFP 7:39 a.m., March 19, 2024

The eight public service unions have joined forces and are calling on the 5.7 million public employees to mobilize on Tuesday in Paris and in the regions so that 2024 is not a “blank year” in terms of remuneration. 

From Auxerre to Quimper via Paris, civil servant unions are calling on the 5.7 million public employees to mobilize on Tuesday to obtain salary increases, ruled out until now by the government in a constrained budgetary context.

General increases requested

“We are asking for general increases and (...) above all real negotiations” on salaries with the executive, summarized Monday on RTL the general secretary of the CFDT Marylise Léon, who will lead the Parisian demonstration alongside Sophie Binet (CGT) and Frédéric Souillot (FO).

The scale of the mobilization will be one of the issues of the day, four months before the Olympic and Paralympic Games during which the CGT and FO have already promised to file strike notices.

Despite rare inter-union unity in the call for mobilization, representative organizations expect lower percentages of strikers than during the demonstrations against pension reform in early 2023 (15% to 30% of strikers depending on the sector).

Teachers will march against government education policy

But "there are sectors in which things are going rather very well, this is particularly the case with National Education", assures Gaëlle Martinez, the general delegate of Solidaires-FP.

Teachers will also march against the government's educational policy and in particular against the creation of "groups" at college.

This controversial measure of the so-called "shock of knowledge" reform is accused of giving rise to "academic separatism and social sorting", according to the CGT Educ'action which called on staff to meet in a general assembly to debate the renewal of the movement after the 19th.

A demonstration will start at the beginning of the afternoon in Paris 

In Paris, the demonstration will start at the beginning of the afternoon from around the Jardin du Luxembourg (6th arrondissement) and will head towards the ministerial district in the 7th arrondissement.

Gatherings are planned in the morning in front of many prefectures and sub-prefectures, such as in Nantes, Besançon or Cambrai. 

The unions are demanding new general increases, after those of 3.5% and 1.5% agreed in 2022 and 2023. But at a time when the government is promising 10 billion in budgetary savings in 2024 and double that in 2025, the Minister of the Civil Service Stanislas Guerini refuses to take out the checkbook.

This follower of Emmanuel Macron highlights the nearly 14 billion euros spent since 2022 to support the purchasing power of civil servants and proposes establishing annual salary negotiations in the public service, like what is practiced in companies.

“We are not an adjustable variable,” squeaks Fabien Golfier, secretary general of the Autonomous Federation-Public Service.

“We’re on the bone”

Even if annual salary negotiations were held, they would only lead to salary increases in 2025, which would make 2024 a "blank year", worry in unison the eight representative unions (CGT, FO , CFDT, Unsa, FSU, Solidaires, CFE-CGC, FA-FP).

On Thursday, the last meeting on salaries came to an end: seven unions slammed the door to denounce the choice, according to them, "highly biased" of the figures presented by the government.

FO, for its part, refused to attend the meeting, criticizing the government's "biased" diagnosis of recent developments in civil servants' salaries.

“We have not made a choice between the figures that we like and the figures that we do not like,” responds the ministry.

“It is not our fault if the debate did not take place,” adds those close to Stanislas Guerini.

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In a document sent to unions before the meeting, the government says that public sector salaries have increased faster than inflation in recent years.

But the indicator used to support this assertion is not the most relevant, judge the unions, who prefer to highlight figures from INSEE according to which the average salary has increased more than twice as quickly in the private sector as in the public between 2011 and 2021. And readily recall that the value of the index point, which is used to calculate the basic salary of civil servants, was almost frozen from 2010 to 2022. "There are 500,000 civil servants who earn less than 1,508 net euros per month", Marylise Léon warned on Monday.

For the general secretary of the CGT Sophie Binet, "we are at the bone (...) It is not normal for the purchasing power of civil servants to erode to this point", she lamented Monday on RMC/BFM TV.