Information meetings, tours in the services, training of candidates: a few days before the professional elections, scheduled for December 1 to 8, the public service unions are multiplying to mobilize agents and fight against abstention.
At the Public Finance Center in Douai, Thomas Remmery skims the three floors on this Tuesday at the end of November. “The CEO of Leclerc announces a tsunami of inflation in 2023, with double-digit inflation,” explains the slender CGT candidate to the agents of the personal tax service. “The CGT vote is an effective way to make it heard that we do not agree with what is happening,” he insists in front of a handful of silent agents.
Among the civil servants, “part of the population is close to the unions and is well aware of the issues of representativeness and union work with the community”, welcomes Géraldine Chopineau, CFDT candidate in a departmental council in the west of France. . “But there is another part of the agents to whom we must go,” she adds immediately.
The generalization of electronic voting in the state civil service (2.5 million agents), after experiments in certain ministries in 2014 and 2018, divides the unions. In the accounting management department in Douai, Marjorie Lannoy is one of the good students. In Public Finance since 2004, she has already created her account and will vote, in the hope of improving her working conditions.
“The future is not rosy”
“We only work on an emergency basis. Having enough arms to do the job on time would be really good, ”she sighs on a half-empty board.
“There are a lot of changes at the moment, the future is not rosy”, confirms a lower floor Corinne Azzoug, employed in the land registration service. “But hey, I’m approaching retirement so I hope it will go that far! she hopes.
“I am one of the abstentionists”, affirms for his part Alexandre who did not wish to give his last name. “We have the impression that decisions are taken upstream (…) whatever the unions say,” regrets this agent recruited eight years ago. During the last professional elections in 2018, the turnout fell for the first time below the symbolic threshold of 50%.
“There we had equipment for relaxation, a coffee machine, that’s not what will replace staff”, he breathes while the representatives of the CGT enumerate the four instances for which the Douai agents are about to vote.
Find future candidates
In addition to mobilizing civil servants, we must also find and train candidates to represent the unions for the next four years.
“Many members give up exposing themselves on a union list”, underlines the general secretary of the CFDT Public functions Mylène Jacquot. But for those who take the plunge, the time for the “last straight line” has come.
“Until December 8, we are on the ground, we are mobilizing, we are reducing or eliminating internal meetings”, insists Mylène Jacquot for candidates from Pays de la Loire. In short, “we vote, we make people vote”.
Nine representative unions
These elections present a real issue of hierarchy between the nine representative unions: in 2018, thanks to the votes won in the public service, the CFDT had become the first union in France, public and private sectors combined.
In the public, it is still overtaken by the CGT. “You have to be realistic”, judges a source within the CFDT, “the movements are slow” and the conquest of first place in 2022 would be a surprise.
“We are counting on 2026 instead”, we add from the same source. In 2018, public officials gave nearly 530,000 votes to the Montreuil plant and nearly 460,000 to the CFDT.