Ken Tatham, right, British-born mayor of
St Céneri le Gerei. 'They could do with a bit of Mrs Thatcher here,' he
says. Photograph: Jean Francois Monier/AFP
Aurélie Boullet is an unlikely whistleblower. A straight-A
student, she attended Paris's most prestigious universities and won a
coveted place to train as a high-ranking civil servant in local
government. On the first morning in her first job at the regional
council of Aquitaine, she immediately felt there was something very
wrong. Her first task took her an hour, but she was told it was a week's
work.
"It was a sheer waste of time. There are plenty of people
and not enough work. So there are a lot of people who have nothing to
do," she says. "They go on Facebook, they chat, they go to endless
meetings and spend a lot of their day complaining about being
overworked."
Writing under a pen name Zoé Shepherd, she started a
blog documenting the daily grind of not having enough to do. Her blog
picked up hundreds of followers from all over France, many also
languishing in dusty corners of government with not enough to do.
"These
are not people celebrating being able to be lazy, but frustrated that
they can't do more," she says. The blog became a book, Absolument
Debordée (Absolutely snowed under), Boullet was exposed by a colleague
and, amid a blizzard of publicity last June, she was suspended. Her
employers issued a statement accusing her of producing a 300-page
"denigration" of her colleagues. "One more drop in the populist
anti-civil servant discourse that we hear too often," it said.
The
book provided ammunition for those on the right who believe that the
French president Nicolas Sarkozy should be pushing through plans to
shrink the state. It also coincided with renewed pressure from the EU
for member states to bring deficits under control – a thought that has
not much troubled a French leader since the last time the budget was
balanced in 1976.
A "natural wastage" policy of reducing the civil
service by not replacing half of retirees was extended at the budget
last autumn as part of the €45bn (£39bn) deficit reduction programme.
The ministries are being reorganised to reduce costs and every part of
government – other than higher education – has had its funding frozen.
To
understand the scale and complexity of the French state, you might
start at its most local point, for example, in the mayor's office of
Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei, a picturesque village with a population of 140
people in Basse (lower) Normandie. It has a river bubbling through it, a
church that draws up to 5,000 visitors in a high-season weekend and
ancient ruins of a castle bearing the scars of battles with the British.
Ken
Tatham, the UK-born mayor, has powers to determine local taxes,
register births, deaths and marriages, and controls a budget of
€100,000. Over the years he's been the first official called to the
scene of five suicides. He spent last weekend negotiating a lost Polish
lorry that got stuck in a lane.
"If anything goes wrong or if
there's any sort of problem they come and see me. They've lost a dog?
They ring me up. Their wife is ill? They ring me," he says.
The
mayor is at the heart of civic life, but above that are several layers
of local and regional government, each with its own responsibilities,
tax powers, independence and back office.
Tatham takes me down to
the bridge across the river that bisects his village in an attempt to
explain how France in governed. On one side is the département of
Sarthe, on the other is the départment of Orne. Cross the bridge and he
loses all power. Two other authorities have responsibility for the road
crossing the bridge and a tiny metal button nestled in the brickwork
marks the boundary.
"No doubt about it, the French state is too
complicated; nobody understands it. When things are that complicated it
makes civil servants very powerful because only they understand how it
works," he says.
A huge reorganisation of regional government is
under way, with plans to merge the councillors of 96 départements,
created by Napoleon and designed for a man on a horse to cross in a day,
with 22 regional councils. The last elections for the old-style
départements were held on Sunday.
Ostensibly the reforms are about
rationalisation and efficiencies, but most suspect a political motive.
Merging the two will dilute the Socialist party's domination of the
regions with the vote from the départements, which tend to go to the
right. It's as yet unclear how it will affect the two separate
administrations.
Tatham is sceptical: "I doubt the reforms will
help. They are going to create something just as difficult. I'm sure it
will create more jobs."
The reforms are being driven by Alain
Lambert, president of Orne département, which contains Saint Céneri. A
powerful politician on the right of the UMP, he was the budget minister
in Paris until 2004 and has been the driving force for the reforms. But
even he acknowledges the difficulty, describing the changes as "about as
easy to achieve as banning the kilt in Scotland" because they mean job
losses for elected councillors and upheaval for the civil service.
Lambert said he believes half of the civil service should be sacked immediately as a "wake-up call" for the country.
"Administrations
pass on their complexities to families and businesses with more and
more Kafkaesque regulations, then harass them with audits which paralyse
both public and private activity and initiatives," he says.
Lambert
says reform is frustrated by the sheer size, weight and power of the
civil service. "In France, these administrations dominate the political
body, even become merged with it," he says.
Tatham, who was born
in Leeds but has lived in the village for 44 years, blames the threat of
strike from the unions. "They could do with a bit of Mrs Thatcher
here," he says.
Michele Kauffer is secretary of the public
services union within the General Confederation of Labour (CGT),
France's best-known union. The CGT offices are in a monolithic concrete
building on the outskirts of Paris with a whiff of the 1980s about
them.
Kauffer says that though the cuts seem small on
international comparisons, the reality is bigger. The policy of not
replacing one of every two people who leave has removed 100,000 posts so
far. The effects have been profound: fewer teachers and nurses, who are
employed centrally by the state and considered to be civil servants.
Meanwhile, councils have taken on more and more responsibilities from
roads to vocational qualifications and social services, without extra
money, meaning some that are so inclined are rapidly privatising
provision – resulting in increased fees for the public.
She also
cites a subtle chipping away at civil servants' employment rights. A
1994 law that allowed local authorities to sack workers who lost their
job when a service was closed but refused to take three alternative
jobs, has been extended to all civil servants. In reality it is rarely
used, but there are fears it will be.
"It is still a job for life
but there are attacks on that," says Kauffer. "We have more tasks, less
good working conditions and we also have dissatisfaction of a job which
is not well done. Stress is an emerging problem. This was never the case
before."
But even some progressives on the left believe reforms
are needed. Richard Descoings, director of the Sciences Po in Paris,
France's most prestigious school of political science, and a former
adviser to the government's budget ministry, said: "Globally, yes, we
have too many public servants.
"But when you ask, do you think
there are enough nurses in the hospitals, then the answer's no. If you
ask do you find it normal to have 35 students in a class, it's too big."
Thierry
Dedieu, of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour, France's
biggest trade union group, said the blanket policy of not replacing
people was "ridiculous", leaving schools under-staffed and not touching
other areas.
"It is a job for life and you can't be sacked unless
it is very, very serious, and because of this you might have some people
not working as efficiently as everybody else," he said. "But in other
[areas of the] public sector, people are suffering. You might have a
divide in people who are working incredibly hard and others who are not
incentivised by that lifelong employment."
Boullet, who insists
that as a civil servant she is entirely apolitical, agrees. "There are
not enough teachers, not enough nurses, not enough police – but too many
people in the back offices," she said. She blamed locally elected
councillors for stuffing their back offices with staff as a show of
power.
Boullet has now won a legal argument and has been reinstated in another post in the same authority.
She
has more work to do, but believes she could still do more. Her
€3,000-a-month salary as a senior civil servant is more than an ordinary
teacher would ever earn per month in their career in France.
Most
people explain Sarkozy's relative timidity to risk a fight with the
unions over reform on the bruises from last year's bust-up over the
change to the state pension age and the fact that he is up for
re-election next year. Reform is France's great political taboo, and the
timing just isn't right.
However, Owen Tudor, head of
international relations in the TUC back in London, argues that we
shouldn't be fooled into thinking the French cuts are insignificant.
"It's
probably true to say that the French cuts are neither as fast or as
deep as the UK ones," he says. "But the French trade unionists would say
that it's a bigger shock to them. They would say that's what's
happening is a cultural shift, whereas what's happening to us is a
numerical shift in provision."
Others reason that resistance to
any change runs deep in France. "The French hate change," Tatham said.
"When I changed the paving stones in the centre of the village, there
was an outcry. They just do not like change. It's in their genes."
