And yes, it’s the mayor who is serving today! The children of the small town of Zimmerbach in Haut-Rhin are pampered. It’s not every day that a mayor, who lacks staff to provide canteen service, takes the initiative of serving pasta, fruit and vegetables at lunchtime to the village’s schoolchildren. However, it was the choice of Benjamin Huin, a young 32-year-old mayor, also a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Economy and Finance, who took his time while waiting to remedy the problem.
“I have a conviction,” explains the elected official. Every child in France must have a place in public service between noon and two in the canteen. For me it was inconceivable that we would not welcome them due to a personnel problem. We found volunteers who took turns looking after them and feeding them. So it seemed like a completely natural way for me to take my turn like the other volunteers, explains Benjamin Huin. I went there once, my assistant as well, but also municipal councilors, grandparents, parents of students, the deputies of the municipality of Walbach too, the neighboring village with which the after-school is twinned, we makes quite a roll. »
Difficult recruitment
Recruitment, a difficulty that “all sectors of the economy experience”, underlines the mayor. “To take an example, Zimmerbach is a wine-growing village and throughout the month of August, I saw the winegrowers struggling, there are no other words, to find grape pickers. And what strikes me is that for the vast majority, they are elderly people and retirees while there are job seekers who are of working age. It still reminds us of a deep malaise and this is noticeable in all professions, everyone has difficulty finding people. It’s a real subject with the relationship to work in our society. »
However, the village’s elected officials had anticipated the demand and calculated in June that two people would be missing at the start of the school year in September. “Zimmerbach is in what is called an intercommunal educational gathering (RPI), that is to say that the schools of Zimmerbach and our neighbor Walbach, at the very beginning of the Munster valley, are twinned. There are classes in both villages, but the extracurricular for the canteen at lunch break and after school is done entirely in Zimmerbach. We welcome 70 children who eat in the canteen every day, and for this we must have eight staff members by regulation. We were missing two the whole month of September. »
Beyond the friendly anecdote of the mayor who serves food to the children of the village, the question of employment in the areas of care and personal services arises once again, such as in hospitals, nursing homes, public child services… According to the elected official, several solutions could significantly remedy this. First of all “make work more remunerative than inactivity, make it more attractive”, but also that “this is a lot simpler for employers » to hire. “There are too many rules, too many standards. There are so many procedures, so much paperwork that it delays the actual hiring. »
Our youth employment file
Another lever and not the least according to Benjamin Huin, that “these essential professions are valued”, with more aid also for employers. “For us, extracurricular is financed by three things: by subsidies from the CAF, by what the parents of the students pay, and finally by subsidies from the two municipalities which amount to a total of 62,000 euros. We would like to increase it but it is not possible for a small rural town.”
While waiting for things to change, the students of the two small Alsatian towns will no longer have the pleasure of seeing the mayor serve their meal. Two people have in fact just been recruited.