This is the first strike by Sylvie Julien and Myriam Bouboune, in some thirty years of career at the social action center of the City of Paris. With a handful of their 1,500 colleagues, these two women demonstrated behind the City Hall of the capital, Tuesday, October 11, to claim to obtain the Ségur bonus, or 189 euros net per month. “We are told that we are not in the social. But there is written “social agent” on our payslips. And the restaurants where we work are not like the others”, argues Sylvie Julien. They do the mise en place, the service, the dishes and the cleaning in restaurants Emerald, for the elderly. And much more: they greet everyone with a kind word, help people in wheelchairs, cut meat, clean multiple “minor damage”under the insults sometimes… “We feel devalued. It goes beyond money. We want equality. We want to be recognized for our work”states Myriam Bouboune calmly.
The word “recognition” comes up like a leitmotif, almost always accompanied by the word “exhaustion”, in the mouths of many professionals in child protection or support for precarious, disabled, elderly people… 15,000 of they took to the streets, on September 28, under the banner “Who takes care of us? “. An unprecedented crowd, for those who usually take care of others, but which had little echo.
The malaise in these “care” professions, if it is not new, has gained in intensity after the crisis caused by the Covid-19. “During the confinements, everyone got involved, invented, whatever their service. But we were not one of the priority professionals for access to masks. We weren’t talked about on TV.”, deplores David Souchet, director of the social association Le Relais, which operates in Cher and Nièvre.
“Forgotten from Ségur”
The social and medico-social staff, whose already low salaries had gradually been caught up or hounded by the minimum wage, were then “the forgotten of Ségur”, the July 2020 conference at the end of which the bonus of the same name was allocated to employees of hospitals and nursing homes. It has since been extended twice, but some still remain on the side of the road, such as the listeners of Samusocial or 3919, the national emergency number for women victims of violence.
Ditto for administrative, technical and logistical functions, often the least well paid, which are nevertheless essential in establishments caring for vulnerable groups. With, as a result, a feeling of injustice. “Even those who ended up having the Ségur are bitter at having lost a year, observes Isabelle Ragot, who runs a medicalized reception center for APF-France handicap in La Rochelle. And, between soaring real estate and inflation, this premium is not always enough to retain them. »
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