CHU de Bordeaux. FO et CGT Pellegrin négocient des primes supérieures seulement pour leurs permanents
© FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP
As every year, the holders of the civil service are “noted”, through an evaluation allowing to develop an “overall mark” between 0 and 1, which determines the obtaining of a first annual more or less high. This year a government decree came out to facilitate the work of hospital management following the reform of assessment interviews, setting a minimum score of only 0.25. A ridiculous minimum proposed by the government, in the continuity of the contempt constituted by the masquerade of the Ségur of health. If we are only talking about a first, far from the necessary salary increases, we must still point out the weakness of the minimum score after the collective effort made by health workers during the health crisis. In addition, it is a policy which concerns only the incumbents and de facto excluded from the most precarious sectors of the hospital: the contract workers, the workers in the subcontracting or in the private sector, will have nothing.
But following this announcement, while behind closed doors consultations were underway to obtain a higher rating, certain union leaderships took scandalous positions: the Force Ouvrière union of the Bordeaux University Hospital was particularly eager to ask for “the excellence ”to management, ie +1 point, for their union officials only, a request that the CGT Pellegrin also claimed later.
While at the same time these union sections have signed an agreement giving +0.65 to the other agents, it is an indecent attempt to obtain financial advantages linked to union office. This request expresses a clear position of these union leaderships, which, through their cordial relationship with the leadership, will undoubtedly obtain a first superior. And the director of the Bordeaux University Hospital, Yann Bubien, indeed replied that he recognized ” the involvement of union officials during the crisis And was therefore in favor of this distinction.
In short, a way for management to buy social peacekeeping. If the latter recognizes the work carried out during the health crisis by the union leadership, we can indeed agree that the unions have played an exemplary role in conflict which largely protected the management and the government during the health crisis. . While hospitals have been overwhelmed, paying the price for the austerity policies of recent decades, no serious battle plan has succeeded in wresting dignified working conditions, making it possible to face the worst moments of the pandemic.
While this request is simply shameful, a battle by leaflet also ensued, Force Ouvrière boasting of having obtained +0.65 for all (while they were negotiating +1 for them therefore!) And accusing certain sections , like that of the CGT Haut-Lêveque for not having signed this agreement at +0.65. Indeed, the section of this branch of the CHU held the coherent position of +1 for all without distinction, unlike these union leaderships who consider a priori that only their work was “excellent” and not that of the whole. agents.
In this internal battle between the unions, we have to see what the agents want. Did they hear about this decree and the negotiations opened around it? No democratic general assembly was called to discuss it, only exchanges between the delegates and the management, behind closed doors. We must fight against these forms of union bureaucracy and the sad use they make of the union tool today. By campaigning for the self-organization of mobilisations and our organizations, grassroots management and for the grassroots to put an end to the prevailing anti-democratism and the increasing betrayals. If these union leaderships put forward their “institutional implications” during the crisis, should they be reminded that union time is given for that? Without denying the burden that a union mandate can represent, we can in no way excuse these indecent requests for different treatment for delegates. Beyond the conventionally organized elections, unions must be structured to prevent this type of drift, with revocable mandates for example.
We defend in any case forms of unionism radically different from this one, bringing perspectives for all health workers, associating all sectors and seeking to develop battle plans at the height of the social disaster that our hospitals are going through today, with common demands and democratic methods to convince people to get involved.
If this affair expresses the current decadence of the historic union leaderships, which thinks in their place and in obtaining a few additional crumbs, we must not abandon these union tools, but rather invest them and push for refocusing on the deep issues that go through the health system as such, which is collapsing in its entirety, and this is not a poor first annual nor is not even a 13th month that will improve working conditions and even less allow hiring of new staff yet necessary. In a health context which is deteriorating again in the world, it is necessary to succeed in imposing emergency measures, through the nationalization of both the public health service and the pharmaceutical industry. The control of the population and workers over these tools to face the pandemic can put an end to the austerity policies which have closed beds even in the midst of a health crisis or to the industrial logic which still makes the poorest countries today. do not have full access to the vaccine.