Towards the elimination of the second public holiday? The Budget Minister says he is open “to the debate”

Should we remove a second public holiday from the calendar? The topic is delicate, but the Budget Minister, Laurent Saint-Martin, showed himself open to a parliamentary discussion on the topic on Tuesday, believing that such an idea “goes in the right direction”. While parliamentarians want the elimination of a second public holiday, in addition to Whit Monday being transformed into a day of working solidarity, the minister responded on TF1: “this is part of the debates we will have in Parliament”.

“I think anything that allows our country to demonstrate that we can work harder to participate in the recovery effort is going in the right direction,” he said. However, he did not want to indicate a particular day on the calendar: “We must leave flexibility for it to work.” At the Sunday LCI, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Antoine Armand, also found “the proposal very interesting, worth looking at closely”.

A “common sense measure”

Laurent Saint-Martin also defined the planned alignment of public sector employees’ sick pay with that of the private sector as a “measure of common sense and fairness”, which has angered public sector unions. “We don’t understand why there are still differences between the public and private sectors,” he said.

He confirmed the government’s intention to let the budget debate conclude in the Assembly, recalling that, if Parliament “has as many amendments as it wants”, the text will have to be sent to the Senate after the constitutional deadline of 40 days. Faced with this desire to tighten the conditions for sick pay for public employees, the general secretary of the CGT, Sophie Binet, calls for an end to the “beatings of public employees”.

When questioned on the BFM, she condemned the idea of ​​eliminating a second public holiday from the calendar and mentioned Guillaume Kasbarian in passing. “This Minister of the Civil Service evidently hates public employees” given his declarations or his intentions to “resume the reform of the civil service left by his predecessor, a red rag”. In this sense Sophie Binet invited “employees and pensioners not to give in to fatalism” and to “increase mobilizations”.