Ihe France has 5.7 million civil servants, whose remuneration problems refer both to the question of purchasing power in a context of inflation and to that, specific to them, of the attractiveness of the professions of the public sector. Admittedly, the salary is one lever among others of this attractiveness, but the freezing of the value of the index point over the long term ended up making the other levers almost ineffective, in particular the attractiveness of the missions. For more than a decade, civil service wage policies have been primarily linked to the control of public expenditure, at the expense of any establishment of a long-term contract of trust between the employer State and public officials.
Admittedly, because of individual increases (internal promotions, grade and step advancements) and category increases (one-off adjustments to the grids for such and such a category, such as the Ségur de la santé, the Grenelle de l’éducation, the Beauvau de la security…), the freezing of the value of the point for more than ten years has not completely blocked the increase in the remuneration of public officials. Nevertheless, between 2013 and 2020, the average net salary in the public sector increased by 8.83%, while it increased by 14.35% in the private sector. The same is true of the median net salary, which, between 2013 and 2020, grew by 13.72% in the private sector and by 9.91% in the public sector.
This is why, in a context of inflation (5.2% in 2022 and 4.3% forecast in 2023), the revaluation of 3.5% in July 2022, the largest annual since 1985 according to the Minister of civil service, Stanislas Guerini, does not mean an equivalent increase in the purchasing power of civil servants. Between 2012 and the end of 2023, with inflation of 22.8% and in the absence of regular point increases, civil servants will have lost 18% of their standard of living.
“Official bashing”
To this erosion of purchasing power, common to all civil servants, was added the settling of the index grids. This phenomenon is caused by increases in the minimum wage, which is rising faster than the average civil service salary. The catching up of increases in the minimum wage by the index grids means that, over time, an increasingly large proportion of the lower levels of categories C and B are paid the minimum wage. This causes a feeling of stagnation for the young agents and generates for the older ones a very strong reduction in the salary differential linked to seniority. Following the new increase in the minimum wage to 1er January 2023, which benefited 400,000 public officials, a category A employee from 1er level thus has a monthly index remuneration which is higher than the minimum wage by only 179 euros. And despite the revaluation of the beginnings of the career of category B agents at 1er September 2022, this difference is only 14.55 euros for a category B agent on 1er rung. And it is… 7 euros for a category C agent nine years after entering the public service. Whereas in 2006, it was still 77 euros!
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