The fall of the Barnier government and the fourth Minister of National Education in 2024, Anne Genetet, has not discouraged teachers. Nearly one in three went on strike on Thursday, December 5, to protest against the deterioration of their working conditions and pay, as part of a movement across the entire civil service. 40% of school teachers have mobilized and 23% of secondary school staff, according to figures from the Ministry of National Education. The FSU mentions 65% and 54% of strikers respectively.
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Teachers form the bulk of the troops of mobilized civil servants. There are 18.6% of strikers in the state civil service, but only 2.3% if we remove national education, according to data transmitted by the entourage of Guillaume Kasbarian, resigning minister of the civil service, then that education personnel represent approximately one in five civil servants. Between 130,000, according to the authorities, and 200,000 people, according to the CGT, demonstrated throughout France.
This strong mobilization of teachers – comparable to that of January 2022 at the time of the wave of the omicron variant during the Covid-19 crisis – does not surprise education unions. “There is great anger in national education. The increase from one to three days of waiting time and the reduction in compensation for sick leave are punitive measures”judged a large inter-union (Sud, CFDT, Unsa, FSU, Snalc, CGT) before this day of action, as if the civil servants were “guilty of being sick even though successive governments bear heavy responsibility for the deterioration of their working conditions”.
“When I am sick, I am not replaced”
For many of the professors seen in the Parisian procession, the extension of the waiting period in the event of sick leave – a project with an uncertain future due to the motion of censure against the Barnier government – acted as the last straw too much in an already full vase.
A nursery school teacher, suffering from a cold in these first days of December, Caroline (the people mentioned by their first name wish to remain anonymous) experienced the announcement of this measure as an injustice. “We are on the front line with children. We obviously catch their germs. I have had Covid seven times, for example. But I come to work even when I am sick because I know that I will not be replaced”relates the teacher who brandishes a sign reading “No occupational health, virus bath in kindergarten = double penalty”.
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