French Civil Servants Demand Pay Raises

Civil servants are marching across France to try to extract salary increases from the government despite a restricted budgetary context, but the mobilization was relatively poorly attended in the middle of the afternoon.

The scale of the mobilization is one of the issues of the day, four months before the Olympic and Paralympic Games during which the CGT and FO have already promised to file strike notices.

According to the Ministry of Civil Service, 6.4% of the 2.5 million state civil service agents were on strike at midday. This rate of strikers amounts to 2.85% in the territorial civil service and 2.2% in the hospital civil service.

Despite rare inter-union unity in the call for mobilization addressed to the 5.7 million public employees, this is lower than during the demonstrations against the pension reform at the beginning of 2023, when we counted 15% to 30% of strikers according to the sectors.

In National Education, one of the main employers of public employees, 6.77% of teachers were on strike in the first level (nursery and elementary) and 10.65% in the second level (middle and high schools), according to ministry figures.

The Snes-FSU, the first secondary union, recorded 30% of teachers on strike, with in particular 53% of teachers on strike in the middle and high schools of Seine-Saint-Denis, mobilized for a month against the implementation of groups in 6th and 5th grade at the next school year, synonymous according to them with “sorting of students”.

The unions are demanding new general increases, after those of 3.5% and 1.5% agreed in 2022 and 2023.

But at a time when the government is promising 10 billion euros in budget savings in 2024 and double that in 2025, the Minister of the Civil Service Stanislas Guerini refuses to take out the checkbook.