Change of scenery in sight for the thirty-five hours battle between Anne Hidalgo and the government. After the Town Hall, the regional prefecture and the ministries, it is in court that the case is about to arrive. The State is in fact preparing to bring before administrative justice the device designed by the City of Paris to increase only marginally the working time of its officials. The latter announced, Monday, September 27, that there was no question for her to modify her project, considered illegal by the state. “Under these conditions, the mechanical consequence is that Mme Hidalgo will end up in court to answer for his act ”, we say to the ministry of transformation and public service.
The judges will thus have to decide between two divergent visions of social progress. On the one hand, the socialist mayor defends the achievements of municipal officials, and refuses to increase their working time too much. On the other hand, the government believes that in the name of fairness, all civil servants should work as much, in Paris as elsewhere. A debate that is both technical, legal, and very political, while Anne Hidalgo is determined to challenge Emmanuel Macron for the presidential election of 2022.
“Special working environment”
It all goes back to the law of August 6, 2019 on the transformation of the public service. According to this text carried by the Macronist majority, the effective working time of territorial civil servants must be identical to that of the State civil service, the equivalent of thirty-five hours per week. However, in Paris, agents have long benefited from a more favorable framework, obtained at the time of Jacques Chirac and then Jean Tiberi. For the approximately 53,000 agents of the City, the reference working time is limited to 1,552 hours per year, instead of the traditional 1,607 hours. Sometimes it even turns out to be even weaker.
The 2019 law obliges Paris and all municipalities in this situation to end these benefits. From 1er January 2022, civil servants must work 1,607 hours per year, everywhere in France. In the capital, this means cutting eight days of leave per year. A social decline that the unions totally refuse, and which Anne Hidalgo and her team do not want either.
After a year of reflection and negotiation, a mechanism was adopted by the Paris Council on July 6. While eliminating the eight days of extra-legal leave, this new regulation recreates seven, using different methods. From “Tips” denounced by the regional prefect Marc Guillaume in a letter to Anne Hidalgo on July 29. He is opposed in particular to the first three days that the Town Hall intends to recreate in the name of “The intensity and [de] the particular working environment of the agents of the Parisian community ”. According to the Town Hall, all municipal officials deserve these three additional days of leave because they work in a noisy and polluted city. For the state, such a favor “Of general application” is illegal. “Its adoption would create a breach of equality” between the officials of the town hall who would benefit from it and those of the State who, while working in Paris, would not be entitled to it.
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