2023-12-03 13:54:30
Published on Dec 3 2023 at 12:54
During the pension reform, the debate focused on civil servants in the active category who leave before the legal age. But there is another facet that has been little highlighted: the weight of seniors among public officials.
According to the annual report on the state of the civil service for 2023 to which “Les Echos” had access, 2,052,000 agents out of 5.7 million are aged 50 and over, or 36% of the total in 2021. This is much more than in the private sector, where they represent 31% of employees, calculated the Ministry of the Civil Service based on INSEE data for 2021.
“In the public service, over the same period and with the same source, the share of these agents is on average 6 points higher than that noted in the private sector,” notes the report which evaluates the proportion of agents of at least under 50 years old in 2014 to 34% in the public sector and 28% in the private sector.
Job guarantee
The distortion of the age pyramid has been significant over the last ten years, underlines the annual report: in 10 years, the weight of seniors has increased by 27.9%.
This development is linked to the increase in the legal retirement age by two years in 2010. It is also linked to the guarantee of employment of established civil servants. The proportion of people in their 50s and 60s among contract workers is also lower: 23% were at least 50 years old, compared to 42% of permanent workers in 2021.
The territory most concerned
The weight of seniors expected to remain permanently employed in their administration, which will be further reinforced by the latest pension reform, makes the question of working conditions all the more acute. A file that the Minister of Transformation and the Civil Service, Stanislas Guerini, must open with the unions as part of the social agenda.
The territorial one is the most concerned. This is where the increase in the weight of those aged 50 and over was the strongest: it gained 9 points to reach 43%. This is all the more a subject as category C jobs, which are more difficult, are over-represented.
But local authorities are not the only ones concerned because category C is also over-represented among older state and hospital employees: on average one in two category C civil servants has passed the 50-year mark.
The proportion of sixty-year-olds doubled in 10 years
The report also focuses on the workforce aged 60 and over before the legal retirement age is raised by two years to 64. It shows that while the proportion of people aged 60 and over remains low in the civil service, representing one in eleven agents, it has more than doubled in 10 years.
They represented 4% of civil servants in 2011 and 9% in 2021. It is within local authorities that this proportion is highest, at 10%, and in the hospital civil service that it is lowest, at 6%. . With the increase in the legal retirement age to 64, the proportion of people in their sixties will necessarily increase, which will reinforce the challenge of working on the conditions for maintaining older employees in employment.
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