Will he get through it? Tuesday April 9, the Minister of the Civil Service, Stanislas Guerini, announced that he wanted to lift “the taboo of dismissal in the public service”, while on the same day he launched consultations with communities, hospitals and unions around his public service reform project. “It is a distortion of the status of the civil service to consider that in the name of guaranteeing employment, we cannot separate ourselves from an agent who would not do his job. Justice is to reward agents who are committed and to sanction those who do not do their job sufficiently,” he explained to Parisian, implicitly emphasizing his desire to increase merit-based pay for civil servants.
If the eight representative unions denounced on Monday a reform in their eyes “dogmatic”, which would not respond “to any of the concerns expressed by public agents”, the question arises of knowing what the legislation already says on the subject of the dismissal of civil servants.
According to the General Civil Service Code, three reasons for dismissal exist: abandonment of position, refusal of three positions after availability or even professional insufficiency. Specificities also exist depending on the branch in which the agent works: in the territorial civil service, the latter can for example be dismissed “for refusing a change in the working hours of a non-full-time job” or for physical incapacity.
A pattern that is too vague
But for Stanislas Guérini, the reason for “professional insufficiency” is too vague and lacks a precise legal definition. In 2023, “only” 13 dismissals for professional inadequacy were pronounced in the state civil service, where 2.5 million agents work, he recalls. “The statute [des fonctionnaires] never explained, not even in 1946 when it was established, that you could not fire someone who does not do their job well. This tool is very poorly defined and above all extremely poorly applied,” he told France Inter on April 10.
However, the minister assures us: the message is not that the public service is too comfortable. Its reform would aim above all to “offer more mobility” to public officials and to allow “work that pays more”. “The status of the civil service is the guarantee of employment. I do not wish to call it into question,” he also clarified, ruling out the hypothesis of the implementation of economic dismissal , as in the private sector.
Stanislas Guerini is not the prime minister to address the issue. The dismissal of civil servants had already been mentioned by Georges Tron, his predecessor, under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. In November 2010, a decree on the reorientation of civil servants when their positions were eliminated was also controversial. The text, still in force, makes it possible to impose reorientation on a civil servant, if he cannot be reclassified in a job corresponding to his grade. At the time, the CGT denounced a “policy of destroying the status” of the civil service.