EU Directives applied in civil service

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A law was passed in France in July 2005 on the application in the civil service of various aspects of EU employment legislation. The new law regulates the use of fixed-term contracts in the civil service and introduces provisions on the reduction of precarious forms of employment, free movement and the fight against discrimination.

On 11 July 2005, the Senate passed the Incorporation of EU law in the civil service Bill, which had been debated for several months. The Act will now be published in the journal officiel (the official record of the French government) .

The Act, which had been presented to the unions on 10 June 2004, incorporates (albeit a few months late) the EC directive of June 1999 on fixed-term contracts into French civil service law. The provisions passed by the Deputies as early as 6 April 2005 and applicable to the three branches of the civil service (central government, local government, hospitals) also deal with:

• The reduction of precarious forms of employment,

• The free movement of people,

• The fight against all forms of discrimination in the civil service.

These provisions aim particularly to govern the use of fixed-term contracts that were previously allowed to succeed one another endlessly. Some 250,000 people are estimated to be employed under such a contract, even though the Sapin plan for overcoming precariousness in 2000 (FR0007175N) was supposed to end up with some 100,000 civil service staff on such contracts being offered permanent positions with civil servant status. By May 2004, only 26,630 had been granted such positions.

Due to the 2005 Act, the length of a fixed-term contract will be three years. Contracts will be renewable up to a maximum of six years, and after that employment can only be continued in the form of a permanent contract.

All EU nationals can apply for work in the whole civil service apart from regulated occupations (e.g. hospital practitioners) and those linked to the exercise of sovereignty (police officers, judges and other justice department officials, diplomats, etc.).

Other provisions in the Act provide for reducing discrimination. They extend, for example, some family-related measures hitherto reserved for women, to men. They also make the age limits and qualification criteria required for recruitment the same for men and women.

Socialist and Communist members of the National Assembly and the Senate have criticised some of the new provisions, perceiving them as 'a risk of seeing a two-tier civil service created'.

The Senior Consultative Councils for the 3 branches of the civil service (central government, local government, hospitals) had unanimously rejected the Bill put forward by the Ministry.

The unions that attempted to pressurise parliamentarians into including amendments, were critical of the new law. They argue that what mattered was to find solutions enabling an end to be put to the system that was placing workers without civil service status in positions of intolerable precariousness. Moreover, they based their arguments on the general principles grounding the general status of civil servants, particularly the rule according to which 'permanent civilian State jobs are held by civil servants' (Article 3 of Law 83-634 of 13 July 1983), so that the integration of staff into the civil service should occur by granting employees full civil service status, not by extending permanent contracts.

This information is made available through the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO), as a service to users of the EIROnline database. EIRO is a project of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. However, this information has been neither edited nor approved by the Foundation, which means that it is not responsible for its content and accuracy. This is the responsibility of the EIRO national centre that originated/provided the information. For details see the "About this record" information in this record.