His words risk, once again, triggering an outcry. The government plans to eliminate categories A, B and C from the civil service, as part of the reform of the sector that it must present in the fall, Minister Stanislas Guerini indicated on Tuesday, May 14. “This is a subject that I am putting on the table,” said the Minister of Transformation and Public Service on the Public Senate channel.
“Today, categories often lock up public officials, they create glass ceilings that are very difficult to break,” he assured. “I am in favor of introducing more […] tools that make it possible to better promote training, better promote acquired experience to be able to evolve more quickly and easily”, insisted Stanislas Guerini.
Many agents who are too qualified
A structuring element in the careers of 5.7 million public officials, the category system classifies civil servants according to their level of diploma. Category C, the lowest paid, is accessible without a diploma, with a CAP, a BEP or a college certificate, category B with a baccalaureate and category A with a Bac + 2 or Bac + 3 level depending on the branches of public service. But many agents today are too qualified for the category in which they work.
On Tuesday, Stanislas Guerini also addressed his desire to facilitate layoffs in the public service, a proposal which arouses the ire of the unions. “Respect for trade union organizations means not having a hidden project, it means putting the issues on the table. I prefer that we argue a little at the start, that we say things to each other , then we move forward,” he assumed.
“It’s not a job for life […] which I question. There is no economic redundancy in the civil service and I propose to keep that,” he added, before qualifying: “the status (of civil servants, Editor’s note) has never said that we could not dismiss an agent who was not doing his job”. Another controversial proposal, the increase in merit-based remuneration must be done according to criteria “defined as close as possible to the field”.
“It is not up to the minister to define the same indicator for the entire public service, we must leave it to the employers,” said Stanislas Guerini, while reaffirming his intention to “create collective incentive plans to be able to better reward work collectives.” In the past, the minister has already suggested that merit-based remuneration could be awarded according to the quality of a public service or its ability to reduce its energy consumption.
Tensions with unions
Asked on Tuesday about tensions with the unions, he said he was doing “everything in (his) power to create the conditions for transparent consultation”. “We must have the courage to modernize the status. I see that many public officials want to work differently, to be able to evolve more easily,” he concluded.
In a press release published in the afternoon, seven of the eight public service unions insisted that they would not accept “any questioning of the statutory guarantees which allow the recognition of qualifications and the right to a career: categories , rank, step”.
“This legislative project, as far as we know, does not meet the needs of the Civil Service, its personnel, and takes directions which, on the contrary, lead to a step backwards”, assert the CGT, the CFDT, the ‘Unsa, the FSU, Solidaires, the CFE-CGC and the FA-FP.