Michel Barnier announced Thursday evening on France 2 to want “merge public services» et «probably not replace all civil servants» – those who “are not in direct contact with citizens» and those who “are retiring“. A few days earlier, the Court of Auditors called for cut 100,000 jobs in local authorities to participate in the budgetary effort. Faced with the need to make billions of euros in savings, the government is certainly tempted to reduce the number of civil servants, which had 5.7 million agents at the end of 2022. If you ask a leader company how to drastically reduce your expenses, he will not advise you to reduce the heating; he will tell you that we must tackle the payroll.
There would therefore be “too many civil servants“. However, when we know the difficulties of recruiting for National Education competitions (the main item of public personnel expenditure) or the shortages of nursing staff in hospitals, we can doubt the reality of such an assertion. Last March, the “Choose the public service” fair was still held where the State played HRD for the 70,000 vacant positions that it is struggling to fill (army, justice, national education, etc.).
France is not an “over-administered” country
So what is it really? To understand the French situation, it is good practice to look abroad. If international comparisons are often difficult as the scope of “public service” varies depending on the country, the government think tank France Stratégie undertook to compare the levels of administration in 19 developed countries in 2020 with all necessary caution. It turns out that “if France only comes out in 7th position in terms of operating expenditure (as a share of GDP)“. Its administration rate of 90 jobs per 1,000 inhabitants places it in the high average, but far behind the Scandinavian countries. In terms of monetary benefits, France is undoubtedly among the countries which spend the most in proportion to its GDP, the result of a political choice in favor of a strong socialization of risks. But, “France having less recourse to outsourcing than other countries”if we consider all public operating expenditure, direct and indirect, its lead in the ranking diminishes and the gaps with the following narrow.
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As France Stratégie explains, “France therefore has relatively high public operating expenditure without standing out. On the other hand, it stands out for the weight of social benefits in cash (pensions, unemployment, minimum social benefits, family allowances, etc.) which constitute the main item of public expenditure: 20% of GDP compared to 15% in Germany».
Increase in numbers in the territorial and hospital public services
According to the Fipeco website, it is mainly in the territorial public services (FPT) and hospital (FPH) that the workforce has increased. This development responds to the need to meet the growing need for nursing staff in hospitals and public nursing homes, as well as the demand for childcare assistants in nurseries or police officers. All these field professions which form the bulk of the civil service battalions, not those who “produce standards» as MP Eric Ciotti suggests. The workforce of the State civil service (those who work in ministries, the army, the national police, National Education, etc.) has stagnated for twenty years.
Furthermore, since 1997, public employment has grown almost at the same speed as total employment: the share of the civil service in total employment has increased from 19.7% in 1997 to 20.6% in 2020. , before decreasing slightly to 20.1% in 2022 (which means that the number of public jobs increased less quickly than the number of private jobs). We are far from the supposed explosion mentioned so often.
Especially since only two thirds of civil service agents actually have the status of civil servant – and the proportion is decreasing every year – the others being contract workers, less well paid, often on fixed-term contracts and twice as many part-time as civil servants. statutory agents. Here again, far from the cliché of the “immovable” agent.
