Civil service employment observatory created

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In September 2000, a new observatory was created for the collection and distribution of information pertaining to employment in the French civil service. It will also monitor the evolution of jobs and civil servants' skills - areas where information is currently lacking.

On 19 September 2000, the Minister for the Civil Service set up an observatory to monitor employment in the civil service. Now, for the first time, an agency exists to monitor patterns in staffing levels within the three divisions of the civil service (national, regional/local, and hospitals) and to table proposals for the forward planning of civil service employment. The agency's 30-strong steering committee, which is chaired by the Minister, is made up of a senator, a member of the lower house, civil service officials, members of associations of local elected councillors and trade unions.

The establishment of the observatory had been announced in July 1999 and was later made official in the agreement on reducing precarious employment in the civil service signed in July 2000 by all civil service trade unions, except CGT (FR0007175N). The new agency is geared to providing information with a view to finding advance solutions to three problems:

• over the coming decade, almost 50% of current national civil servants will be retiring and will have to be replaced;
• in terms of cutting the number of precarious jobs in the three divisions of the civil service - in the national civil service alone, close to 120,000 workers are employed on a fixed-term contract basis - there are plans afoot to make 5,000 fixed-term employees full permanent civil servants by 2001; and
• in the light of the failure to reach a framework agreement on the reduction of working time in the civil service (FR0003151F), the implementation of the 35-hour working week at a decentralised level, in each department and establishment, requires a change in work organisation or a redeployment of staff. Consequently, it is important to be familiar with the employment profiles of those affected.

For the time being, no reliable statistics are available on either staffing levels within the civil service – estimated at around 5.4 million – or the profile of civil servants themselves. The situation is no better when it comes to employee skills and career paths. The mandate of the observatory is to provide parliament with an annual statistical analysis of – as well as policy suggestions on - staffing levels in the civil service. The unions have cast doubt on the government's willingness to make this watchdog genuinely operational and more specifically on its ability to impose a policy of transparency on the various civil service divisions.