“Departments have essential levers to improve the situation of workers on the “front line””

2023-05-11 08:00:34

UFifteen presidents and presidents of departmental councils have forcefully affirmed the need to defend another vision of work for what they call front-line jobs (home helpers, maintenance workers, ripeurs, etc.), in a beautiful column “Restoring their dignity to “front line” workers”, published in The world of May 2, they underline that these professions have a major social utility and must be better recognized socially and materially. Their work must be able to be carried out in better conditions and benefit from time and resources enabling them to better do and better live their work.

This initiative is all the more remarkable in that it emanates from heads of departmental executives, institutions which, in France today, pilot decisive policies in the construction and regulation of the jobs in question. Let’s take the two main examples. Home helpers (and all workers working with people losing their autonomy) are certainly the first concerned. THE ” department “ sets the amount of the personalized autonomy allowance (APA), but also the rules for contracting with service providers: does it favor non-profit actors? does it support innovative forms of management? does it allow the financing of collective time?

Agents at the frontier of precariousness

Answering these questions is up to the department, because it is the main prescriber of employment conditions. And, in fact, very significant departmental differences are visible, including in terms of remuneration alone: ​​in the Landes, where the public sector has been driven by a proactive departmental policy for a long time, home helpers earn an annual average of almost a quarter more than the national average (14,600 euros versus 11,685 euros in 2019). Conversely, in the Somme department, the average annual salary is 9,620 euros in the same year.

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The 600,000 home helpers are not the only ones to depend directly or indirectly on the decisions of the departmental councils. These, like the regions and municipalities, also manage a large number of public buildings (administrative premises, museums, schools, etc.). For middle and high schools alone, at least 100,000 employees are affected. Obviously, these are not only service agents and contract workers that local authorities employ directly, but also all the employees of service-providing companies (cleaning, security, reception, collective catering, etc.) for whom they are the donors of ‘order.

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