“I am Bip Bip, I run all the time. But it is a human work above all, I like working with children”. Néroli*, 53, is a school nanny in Paris. She has, as she says, the “keys to the kingdom”. It is she who opens the school at 7 am, who opens the classes, who also closes the door when parents arrive really too late. “School is also a discipline! “, says the one who has” the nose and the ears everywhere “. Because it is Neroli who monitors the comings and goings in the school, who receives deliveries, who opens to workers and workers when there are any, and also who cleans the entrance hall and the famous dressing room, his little domain to it.
Her encounter with this profession of the heart, as she describes it, happened in 2012, ten years ago already, when a school guardian spotted her and offered to replace her. Since then, she is always the replacement. Because Néroli has been a temporary worker for 10 years. And despite his visibly optimistic and positive character, this situation weighs on him. “We have to wait for someone to place us somewhere, it’s never certain. It is often at the last minute, we are sent an email on August 25 for September 1, for example. It undermines health,” explains Neroli.
To this uncertainty in the organization is added economic precariousness. Neroli never knows what salary she will have at the end of the month. She shows us her payslip for the month of June: 967 euros for 104 hours. “Can we live in Paris with this sum? she asks.
A pair occupies a full-time position
Contrary to the titular caretakers, the contractors are not housed. And additional constraint, which Néroli has been experiencing since September 2021, they are not allowed to exceed a certain number of hours. “Last year, they arrested me on June 22 saying ‘you worked too much’! “, she says. For this school year, and to prevent her from “working too much”, we have added a partner to her. Neroli therefore works from 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and his colleague from 1:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., throughout the year, except during school holidays. She therefore suddenly has many fewer hours per month than previously, as 20 minutes was able to verify this by consulting his payslips. In total, between July 2021 and June 2022, Neroli worked approximately 1,240 hours, compared to 1,610 hours during the same period the previous year. His loss of salary over the period is nearly 2,500 euros.
Joined by 20 minutes, the human resources assistant of the city of Paris, Antoine Guillou, explains: “We are in this perverse absurdity. There is a regulatory brake which prohibits the recruitment of part-time civil servants. Other communities have the right to recruit part-time staff, we do not have the right. And additional constraint, since the law of August 6, 2019, we do not have the right to recruit contract workers who are between 50 and 100% [de temps travaillé]. We cannot therefore contractualise agents who work more than half-time but less than full-time. »
Candidate problem?
But why, then in the case of Neroli, not to have employed a civil servant? “Sometimes there are no candidates for goalkeeper positions. We have a pool of 2,000 specialized nursery school agents [Asem] and school technical staff [ATE] with inside candidates for the position of guard but we do not always have the match between the person who wishes and the position occupied. In this case, they must not have found a person capable of doing the bit of time that was left”, conjectures Eric Laurier.
Nicolas Léger, co-secretary of the unitary union of Parisian administration staff (Supap-Fsu, which represents less than 10% of agents and agents), has a completely different interpretation: “The precariousness and the presence of “false temporary workers” on permanent positions [qui devraient être en contrat] continuously increasing,” he tells us. The number of temporary workers working more than 910 hours per year at the school affairs department increased from 1,240 in 2017 to 1,838 in 2022, with a continuous increase in the meantime. The direction of school affairs now has more than 11,000 temporary workers, mainly in animation. According to figures provided to 20 minutes by this same department, 1,390 temporary workers were mobilized during the 2020-2021 school year to work as school caretakers, 350 of whom worked annual hours greater than or equal to half-time.
The direction of school affairs of the town hall of Paris affirms that the number of temporary school guards has increased by 9% since 2014, both to ensure a presence when schools open on Saturday mornings and also to improve the fate of the incumbents, who were previously required to be present in their dressing room in the evening, with a weekly schedule of 70 hours. “Afterwards, we had the right to two evenings a week, and then all our evenings”, says Béatrice, who was a caretaker from 1988 to 2021. Now, temporary workers are present from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. people who take evening classes at school. “It improved the well-being of the titular guards but in return it does odd jobs…”, recognizes Béatrice, former union representative. “We have an organization that makes it inevitable to use people who work for bits of time and the goal is to find people who are happy with it,” comments Eric Laurier, deputy director of school affairs for the town hall of Paris.
“We are going to break the lock”
Neroli could certainly have passed the competition to become a holder, but until now, this competition obliged guards and temporary guards to become a cleaning agent for at least five years, before being able to regain their position as guard. The competition is indeed the same as that of the Asem and the ATE, which carry out the maintenance of the establishments or the supervision of the children. “We cannot give everyone the position they would have liked. It’s not like in the private sector where you apply for a position. It is the principle of versatility, very present in the public service, ”justifies Antoine Guillou.
However, the school affairs department assures us that all this will soon change. “We are going to break the lock, announces Eric Laurier. As part of the deprecarization plan and as a derogatory measure, we are going to target contractors who have a certain seniority and they will be appointed directly as caretakers”. The targeted contractors will be contacted individually to support them and encourage them to take the competition, announces the town hall, which competition will consist of a simple test on file with an interview.
Deprecarize those who suffer vacations
Conditions that delight Neroli, who was previously “not comfortable” with the idea of taking the competition. For Eric Laurier, Neroli is typically “the type of agent targeted by the deprecarization plan” of the town hall, which hopes to get 1,600 people out of precariousness on the term of office. The first stage of the plan set a target of 50 “impoverished” school guards. With the desire to completely reduce the number of temporary workers “suffered”, so that only those remain who find it convenient, in short, to work only a small number of hours.
Because the temporary workers who are very happy not to work more, that exists. Neroli knows it well: her own daughter is in this situation. “I was aware that it was not a long-term job”, tells us Océane*, who started the vacations during her studies, and then continued them after the birth of her son, punctually. “This freedom to choose to work or not suited me well, without being blocked for a full year,” she tells us. Today, she has decided to be a full-time mom, and it also suits her very well.
*Name has been changed