The pebble in the shoe of the Ministry of Labor for more than two years is a civil servant with the tunes of Mr. Everyone, friendly and grizzled. Labor inspector Anthony Smith was suspended in mid-April 2020, then transferred automatically, for having taken legal action against an employer who did not sufficiently protect his employees against Covid-19. “Ubuesque”, “worthy of a second-rate thriller”, he asserts today.
Scalded by his arm wrestling with his guardianship, the agent, 47, specifies that he speaks as a CGT union official at the Ministry of Labor, a mandate which gives him a certain freedom of speech. Useful precaution, because the file is highly political: the affair began when Muriel Pénicaud was at the head of the ministry, but the sanction fell after Elisabeth Borne, current Prime Minister, succeeded him.
Rue de Grenelle quickly backpedaled, reducing its sanction in an attempt to bury the file. But the opposition keeps reminding him of that. On September 28, Anthony Smith will ask the Administrative Court of Nancy to erase his sentence. His support committee, co-chaired by two La France insoumise deputies, Mathilde Panot and Thomas Portes, is already increasing the pressure on social networks. Elected officials from the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) have planned to accompany him to the hearing, like researchers, trade union or association activists who form a bloc around him: since 2020, Anthony Smith has been uniting the left on its own. His supporters see in him the embodiment of a labor inspectorate mistreated by economic imperatives.
Entering the profession in 2005, Anthony Smith explains his career choice by the path of his parents. His father, a worker, and his mother, a teacher, transmitted to him the idea that “work is the only way to rise socially”. But their example also structured it politically, on the left. “I saw what the work of a worker was, it shaped me. » He discovers that the company is a place of balance of power which calls for counter-powers. Labor inspection is one of them. Anthony Smith likes to recall that the law which created it, in 1892, prohibited the work of children under 13 and that of women in the mines.
At the service of the labor code
After a few years as an economics teacher, he became a “privileged observer” authorized to enter companies to enforce the labor code and its “great social conquests”. In the Marne, where he is assigned, the bulk of the work is administrative: “exchanges, observations, requests for compliance”. Coercion – reports, work stoppages in the event of serious and imminent danger… – comes as a last resort. The job is no less political. “To be the left arm of the State”, “to serve the code”, he assumes it and makes it his pride. Like being unionized since he was 18, at the UNEF, the student union, then at the CGT, even if he ensures « dissociate [s]we work of [s]we activism ».
You have 60.62% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.