The minister's promise: “The upgrading of town hall secretaries foreshadows the reform of the civil service”

Stanislas Guerini, Minister of the Civil Service. Midi Libre – Michael Esdourrubailh

Stanislas Guerini, Minister of the Civil Service, supported with parliamentarians the law aimed at upgrading the function of town hall secretary. A subject that he says is “important”, and which announces more generally the bill that he intends to launch in the coming days to reform all professions in the public service .

Was there an urgency to legislate on the profession of town hall secretary ?

Yes because it is, in the territorial civil service, one of the professions most in tension with recruitment difficulties and a significant demographic issue. A third of town hall secretaries will retire by the end of the decade. However, in our rural communities, nothing is done without them and, most often in fact, them. We often use the term "Swiss army knife", "cornerstone"… What is certain is that town hall secretaries have an absolutely central role. This has been expected for many years by associations of elected officials. There was therefore an urgency to legislate and I made it an important political marker, because what we do today for town hall secretaries foreshadows what I generally do for the public service. I want to provide the tools to be better able to revalorize professions.

Granting them the title of “general secretary of town hall”, it’is a semantic recognition, but beyond ?

There was a gap between the recognition that we could give them and the level of real responsibility that town hall secretaries exercise. Changing their title is therefore a first step, indeed more symbolic and semantic. With the Minister responsible for local authorities and rurality, Dominique Faure, I wanted this law to allow three important things: it strengthens our ability to recruit from a very large pool, very diverse profiles who come from the function public or outside. They are then promised to be promoted more quickly and easily and this was very important for me because this profession is symptomatic of those on whom we have put a glass ceiling, with very restrictive promotion rules which require them to remain in category C for years. This law breaks this barrier: first with a requalification plan to allow town hall secretaries currently in category C to become category B thanks to better recognition of the experience acquired over the years; then with an accelerated promotion path thanks to training. The law also creates a career accelerator process which will allow you to move up the ladder more quickly and will therefore find a concrete translation in index remuneration, the one that counts for retirement. If I summarize, we open doors and windows, we facilitate mobility and promotion and we accelerate careers. We must now move quickly to translate the law into a decree with the monitoring groups that I have set up with parliamentarians and local employers and trade union organizations to ensure post-vote service.

Going from category C to B costs 70 euros; more per month. Do you think this is enough to make the profession attractive?

This is a first step and the career accelerator system, to move up the ladder more quickly, will obviously also be salary recognition. This is the reason why I invite territorial employers to mobilize, in addition to these new levers, the bonus system which makes it possible to supplement remuneration to take into account the specificities municipalities such as their size or complexity, for example those where there is a strong tourism challenge which implies particular responsibilities. Afterwards, there is no inevitability when it comes to our recruitment challenges. Today we are seeing interesting signals in areas of the public service where we were in difficulty recently, notably hospitals in tense areas. When we give ourselves the means, when we work on pay slip issues but also on training, working conditions, pooling, we find solutions.

You say you want to act in this way for other jobs in the public service. Which ?

At all levels of the public service, we are confronted with these issues of attractiveness. There are 1,000 different professions and I don't want to make 1,000 proposed laws like we just did for town hall secretaries! The reform that I am preparing must provide tools, salary and career building mechanisms which must provide more flexibility and levers to upgrade all these professions. We have remained in the post-war pattern where the initial diploma still remains too decisive in the entire career path. We saw this very strongly during the health crisis where front-line professions, those of connection and care, essential in our society, are too little valued because they are in category C. In the first five-year term, we led an apprenticeship revolution, we gave meaning and value to manual and technical professions, and these are professions that we need in the public service, for example energy specialists to lead the ecological transition. But, they too, with a CAP, are stuck in category C, therefore faced with a glass ceiling. I have learned of communities which have made agents resign from their position to rehire them as contractual agents with better conditions! The current system is far too rigid.

Won't this beautiful promise come up against the reality of austerity?

Today we are stuck in a fairly blind mechanism where when the government decides to change the index point, the cost is 2 billion d’ euros for a moderate impact of a few tens of euros on the pay slips of 5.7 million civil servants without specifically supporting a sector or professional scope in tension. This makes things very complex in a budgetary period which requires us to assume a path of reducing expenditure. Instead, let us provide the levers to have better oriented, more effective salary policies that will allow us to meet the challenge of making the public service attractive. There is a historic pathway and I propose to trade union organizations and public employers to build with them this ambitious reform project starting in April. It’s true, we are in a more complex moment than when we should have carried out this work twenty years ago, but I resolutely believe that this five-year term must be one of reform, and at the same time ;first rank for the civil service. What we are doing today for town hall secretaries, and it started from a senatorial initiative that we all worked on together, is the illustration that we can find a consensus.

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