Minister of Transformation and Public Service Stanislas Guerini said Thursday that he wanted to meet civil servants’ unions before the summer to discuss salary increase measures. “We must be able to sit around the table in the next few days. I won’t wait for the summer, I think it’s more a matter of days and weeks rather than a few months, “said Guerini during an interview on France 2.
Ulcerated by the postponement of the legal retirement age, the representatives of the civil servants are declining for the moment any official exchange with the government or the administration. For the trade unions, with whom the government must hold discussions throughout the first half of 2023 on access to the public service, the increase in wages is one of the priorities.
Faced with inflation of nearly 6%, the general increase of 3.5% granted in the summer of 2022 is denounced as insufficient by the eight representative unions of civil servants, who judged at the end of April an “urgent and essential” salary increase. . The 3.5% increase decided in 2022 represents “2,000 euros per year for a midwife and 800 euros per year for a nursing assistant, for example in the hospital”, maintained Stanislas Guerini. The minister also recalled that the salary of the 1.1 million lowest paid agents had been “realigned” with the minimum wage on May 1.
In a press release published Thursday, the CGT invited the government to “stop all these tinkerings. These measures on low wages are only palliatives”, attacked the union. The Montreuil plant has been calling for 10% increases in salaries and their indexation to inflation for several months. “I was very clear with the trade unions, I told them that this alignment with the minimum wage is obviously not for the settlement of all accounts”, replied Stanislas Guerini on France 2, thus opening the door to other measures of purchasing power.
Another subject is also on the table, he added: that of salary increases “from the first years” in the public service so as “not to freeze the beginnings of a career too much”. Invited Thursday on TV5 Monde, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire dismissed any prospect of indexing wages to inflation in the public sector, a measure likely to “feed the inflationary spiral” according to him. “And then it’s not very fair, because those with the lowest pay levels are going to be increased as much as those with the highest pay levels,” he continued. “However, inflation first affects the most modest and the lowest wages.”
