1,137 euros: this is the average monthly salary in four professions in the medico-social sector, according to the survey Working conditions 2019 from the Ministry of Labor: hospital service agents, nursing assistants, medico-psychological assistants and home helpers.
The same year, the average remuneration of all private sector employees was 1,906 euros. Although these professions, which represent a million jobs, have become strategic for maintaining the autonomy of people, at home or in establishments, they remain insufficiently recognized.
This salary gap could be justified, for example, by the 78% of home helpers working part-time (a quarter of them even working less than seventeen hours per week)… But “part-time does not mean a weak influence of work on the lives of employees”recall the four researchers Annie Dussuet, François-Xavier Devetter, Laura Nirello and Emmanuelle Puissant: it happens to home helpers, who work in multiple locations, to start their day at 7:30 a.m. and end it at 7:30 p.m., all by having only five or six hours counted as work “effective work”. Part-time work is therefore more than constrained.
In their contribution to the scientific mediation project “What do we know about work?” ” of Interdisciplinary laboratory for public policy evaluation (Liepp), broadcast in collaboration with Presses de Sciences Po on the site’s Employment channel Lemonde.fr, these four sociologists and economists explain the persistent difficulties of these professions beyond their remuneration by the failure of current public policies. With the development of a new public management emphasizing the ” performance “the emergence of numerical indicators has established the standardization of tasks, and has “distant from the purpose of the service”.
“This process of industrialization and rationalization of activity results directly from the pricing methods for these medico-social activities by public authorities, which tend to recognize (and therefore finance) only working time considered “productive” ” »point out the researchers.
A form of abuse
The consequences of this rationalization are twofold: workers – 90% of them women – are exposed to both industrial and tertiary hardship, that is to say carrying heavy loads, but also complex relationships with users, and lose the meaning of their work, because they sometimes recognize that following “standards” is a form of mistreatment.
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