This Tuesday, January 11, the new street mobilization of workers in the social sector could confirm that this is a groundswell against the precariousness of all (users as well as professionals), leading to a wide opening of the struggle
Let’s pay attention to small signs. Always. On December 7, it was in a remote and improbable district of Montpellier that social workers managed to gather several hundred (towards the general council, Malbosc, Euromédecine, where many organizations on which they depend) sit. An unexpected success.
This other sign: for several weeks, including the holiday season, unusual posters have flourished in town. Small in size, easy to slip into anywhere, impactful. To each a very brief message: “Richard – 1 ° sleeps in his car – Yet he works”. What answers: “Martin, instructor-educator, 1 year of graduate already in burn-out”. Understand that if Martin, a social worker, has reason to complain about his working conditions, it is Richard’s social situation, which he may have to take care of, which is unbearable, aberrant. Users, professionals, even broken down, same struggle. On the poster, a date follows: “Tuesday January 11”. It’s laconic. It changes completely from the usual verbiage of activist communication. Curiosity is piqued: on January 11, something unusual could happen. A course is given. Finally a QR-Code, at the top of the trend, is available for the passer-by who would like to access more detailed information.
We go there. And there we end up with the statement of the demands of this movement. Yet another new sign: these demands are rather denunciations, which interweave in the same logic what is unbearable in the current social policy, and at the same time in the situation of those whose job is to cope. to social distress. Thus, the mention of “Living conditions of unworthy beneficiaries” rub shoulders directly “Increased workload” employees of the social field in the field. Users and professionals embarked on the same galley. The “Saturation, unsuitability and unsanitary conditions of accommodation facilities” (what the beneficiaries experience) finds an echo in the “Competition between associations” who work in this area (the system that organizes the action of the pros). It’s all linked, global and coherent.
So the requirement of “The immediate suspension of the use of the public force for evictions from squats, shanty towns and housing”, goes hand in hand with the requirement of “The consultation of field workers for the development of public policies”. We have just noted a few extracts. In the end, it follows that the requirement to “The significant upgrading of social work: 400 euros net per month and permanent contracts” no longer appears as a simple categorical, corporatist, traditional demand.
But to begin with, it is the very success of this movement that seems a great novelty. For Elisa or Antoine, who are stakeholders, and whom Le Poing meets, “The strength of the departure came from the crossing of the national initiative, with first the appearance, autonomous but simultaneous, of a whole series of collectives of struggle located all over the territory”. In other words : “The fed up was diffuse but generalized, and it ended up overflowing”. In Montpellier, it is the employees of the social SAMU who could not take it any longer, and sent a letter to the other employees of the services and associations in the field that they knew well as partners in their action. They also knew they were in tension.
Hence the great success of a first general meeting at the beginning of November: more than sixty participants, coming from around thirty structures. Some of these participants are unionized, most are not. If they are, they intervene on a personal basis, but two unions, the CGT and Solidaires are also present under their colors. The collective is therefore autonomous, but it is flexible and without closure: “The official union representation makes it possible to be very clear in the part of the collective’s autonomous initiatives on the one hand, those of the unions on the other, and finally what can be done in common, and then in all clarity”.
Openness is the watchword of Elisa and Antoine (who is also a figure of struggle unionism in Montpellier): “The birth of the movement around social emergency services makes us particularly representative of the sector of integration and precariousness. But we need to reach out to the disability, early childhood, and other sectors as much ”. It is also a question of trades, which are without number: “Animator, social worker, specialist educator, social and family economy counselor, etc.”. But in the structures, out of the question to leave aside secretaries, accountants, security guards: “An accountant in our boxes is paid much less than anywhere else. He is the victim of the same downgrading as us ”.
Other bridges must be created between the employees of private associations and those of social services in the public sector, institutionalized, in local authorities for example (communal CCAS, or departmental council to which falls a good part of the action social). We must also go beyond the fact that employees depend on multiple and different collective agreements, which characterize this field of activity. All this diversity is reflected in the expression “Actresses and actors of social action”, which the collective of struggle has chosen as the title.
But then, how to articulate these disparities, how to produce a conjunction of converging forces, instead of a simple addition of particularities, at the risk of a fragmentation which would dilute any common effectiveness? Basically the Covid played, with its confinements: “We were obviously among the essential workers, remained on the front line alongside the most vulnerable people, but also remained invisible”. This to the point that in the health sector, some will have benefited from bonuses or upgrades, but many others have stayed behind: “The injustice was flagrant, it fostered awareness in an egalitarian sense.”
And now these social workers dare to transgress certain established uses: “Our associative teams are often quite small, with something nice, human, direct, in the working relations. This is good but it can lead to blindness to a reality that is in fact unbearable when we look at the reality of a completely degraded job ”. There is a taboo to be lifted: “The tradition was that we do not go on strike, that we do not suspend our services because we would have felt guilty of penalizing our beneficiaries, who are in great difficulty”. Until now, this same professional culture has also led to “Only claiming improvements in the service we render to people, without daring to claim an improvement for our own conditions”. However, these two aspects are entangled, logically.e.
So it doesn’t hold anymore when “You have a social worker who has to help someone get by who lives on 400 euros, when he himself only earns 600”, Antoine slice. Precarious contracts, time-limited assignments, unwanted part-time work, have spread like a plague in the exercise of the profession. This stems from a global policy: for a number of peripheral questions, affecting marginal populations, the least integrated, the least profitable, the State discharges itself onto the communities put in competition within the framework of decentralization. And the public service discharges itself onto the action of private associations which respond to calls for tenders.
Elisa and Antoine describe this pernicious sequence, typical of neoliberalism: “Markets – that’s really the word – will be put in competition, by segments, here for a mission of supporting unaccompanied minors, there for a shelter, there for a prevention campaign among prostitutes, etc. , etc. It has no more duration, no more overall coherence, no more modulation possible. And the contract will be awarded to the structure which will do it at a lower cost ”. that’s how “You find yourself with only one of our colleagues permanently at night for accommodation of fifty people. Here reception is suppressed, there support proposals are reduced, elsewhere sterile kits for drug users are no longer available. Tensions are increasing, the beneficiaries, often very fragile, are destabilized, risky situations are increasing, for them but at the same time for us ”.
In these professions which often ignore schedules, which face stressful situations, which increase the number of emergencies, which keep their employees in post at nights and weekends, which compensate for nothing or very little of all this, which pay low of scale – profitability obliges! – workers become precarious, those who accept may be the least armed, the least trained, themselves more vulnerable, exposed, not considered. The meaning of the trades can go into a spin: “If you have a reintegration mission that could concern fifty beneficiaries, but where you can only accommodate ten, you come to put them also in competition, by selecting those who have the best criteria to succeed in this program, and you leave the others on the side! ” Evaluation, performance, obligation of result become parameters of social action, scraped to the bone of a logic of management of social flows.
In Montpellier, another lever of the ras-le-bol was the action of the agitator prefect Hugues Moutouh, smashing everything in his path, razing slums and emptying squats, announcing the fakenews of making up temporary hotel nights as a solution relocation. And it is all the work, patient and difficult on this land, of social actors, which was trampled underfoot, destroyed overnight, including the actions hitherto sponsored by the State itself. same. And Mayor Delafosse, linked to this hard right-wing policy by his security obsession pacts, will have seemed light, behind some showcase operations of orderly trip of Luttopia, interim relocations, and other squat mission (which is rather appreciated, but limited in initiative and means).
Concerning workers in struggle, Antoine notes: “After twelve years of work in this field, I have only been on a permanent contract for a year, for the first time, I am receiving 1700 euros, I can only find comfortable accommodation by having an apartment that was available. in the family. And again, I feel like I am one of the privileged! “. For her part, Elisa leaves in an unusual reflection while meditating: “All of this can affect private life. Our jobs, which fascinate us, are so demanding, outside the framework, they make us have such a special life, that we can no longer envision a life as a couple with someone from the same field… It’s weird, no “. But it is not at all bizarre, and even very healthy, to become aware of the links between the parameters of private, even intimate, life and those of social life, and ultimately political life.
Are these workers going to win? Back to the actual news: “We are pushing so that the day of action on Tuesday, which is carried out jointly with the unions in the medical sector, leads to general assemblies in the structures themselves. We should go towards real unlimited work stoppages, which block services, otherwise we will continue to be taken for jokes. We really want it. But it’s not easy ”.
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