HAS the hospital, but more broadly throughout the healthcare system, the same words keep coming back, as in a bad refrain: lack of staff, lack of recognition, physical and mental exhaustion; loss of opportunity for patients, acts of negligence, even mistreatment, of fragile people.
Within the republican school, it is hardly better: 30% fewer candidates in fifteen years for the teaching competitions and one thousand eligible for two thousand five hundred positions to be filled in the competition for school teachers in two of the academies concentrating the students with the most socio-cultural difficulties, those of Créteil and Versailles; the resignations of current teachers, admittedly rare, have also more than tripled since 2012.
How did a country passionate about equality come to actually build, against all its values and despite its institutions, a health system and a two-speed education system?
The common thread that unites these apparently autonomous dysfunctions, since they are present in institutions of very different natures, public and private in particular, is in reality a market failure, in the literal sense: in hospitals, clinics, schools, establishments accommodation for dependent elderly people (Ehpad), crèches, it is the labor market that has been lacking for years.
Drifts
Its absence is the subject of a paradoxical consensus between two antagonistic players: on the one hand, Bercy, which steers the index point and staffing levels year after year by seeking to minimize expenditure, and by keeping to summon too many “benchmark” elements; on the other, teachers, caregivers and their unions, who, attached to the notion of public service and proud of their altruistic career choice in the service of the general interest, immediately dismiss any reference to the private world merchant.
But, for lack of a compass to make these strategic professions attractive, the system is taking on water. By fixing, directly or indirectly (with care and dependency grants for nursing homes, for example), salary scales disconnected from reality, the State always attracts more “irrational” – and heroic – economic agents, who agree to sacrifice their own interest on the altar of the common good or public service.
This recruitment of personnel on a vocational logic is at the origin of other excesses, which are sometimes found in the sector of social and solidarity entrepreneurship: neglect of labor law, blurring of the boundaries between professional life and privacy, burnout, etc.
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