Government employees have protection against dismissal until they retire. The responsible minister is now shaking up this privilege – the unions are threatening strikes.
France has a huge army of civil servants: 2.5 million work for the central state, 1.9 million in municipalities, regions and departments, and 1.2 million in public health. One in five employees in the country works for the state. In Switzerland or Germany there are only half as many.
The French teachers, firefighters and employees in the ministries benefit from attractive conditions – and from de facto protection against dismissal until retirement. But that should now be an end, says the Minister for the Public Service, Stanislas Guerini. He wants to lift the “taboo of dismissal,” as he told the newspaper Le Parisien.
There is already the possibility of terminating incompetent or lazy officials. But that is more of a theoretical nature. Of the 2.5 million central government employees, just 13 lost their jobs in 2023. “We cannot separate ourselves from people who are not doing their jobs,” says Guerini. This is unfair to those civil servants who were committed and achieved good performance.
No layoffs due to financial difficulties
Guerini emphasizes that he is not interested in abolishing civil servant status entirely. Nor is his goal to massively reduce the number of state employees – an idea that does not seem completely absurd given the billion-dollar hole in the state treasury. Rather, the minister argues that there is a need to modernize the rules that were stuck in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, Guerini stung a hornet’s nest with his announcement. The unions feel betrayed by his comments. Because they are currently sitting at the negotiating table with the government and on its initiative to reform the public service and make it more attractive again.
This has become necessary because authorities and hospitals are increasingly finding it difficult to find well-qualified staff. The young people there lack prospects; unlike before, they prefer to work in the private sector. Tens of thousands of government jobs are vacant.
Unions “shocked”
A weakening of protection against dismissal is not exactly what the unions imagine when it comes to upgrading jobs – and it was never explicitly an issue in the talks, they complain. Mylène Jacquot, general secretary of the CFDT Fonction publique union, described Guerini’s proposals as “shocking” and “unacceptable” for civil servants. Another union official explained that the most that could be discussed is that in the future there would be some form of job coaching for civil servants who are not performing well.
In January, President Emmanuel Macron announced that civil servants’ salaries should depend more on their performance – and less on seniority. Even then, the trade unionists reacted angrily. It was said that in the public service, which does not function according to profitability criteria, there is no way to accurately measure an employee’s performance.
Ceasefire terminated
Because of Stanislas Guerini’s recently communicated reform plans, the workers’ organizations have now called off the “Olympic truce”, as the newspaper “Le Monde” writes. On Wednesday, the large GCT union responded with a strike announcement for all areas of the public service and for the entire Olympic period from next Monday to mid-September.
That doesn’t mean that millions of civil servants will actually stop work – the formal strike notice is a prerequisite for state employees to be able to legally strike at a later date. Often the announcement remains. But it is a sign of dissatisfaction and a warning signal to Guerini: If you get serious about the reform, we will paralyze the country. And that’s when the whole world is looking at Paris.