Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu opened a one-month negotiation on public sector pay on Friday at Matignon, announcing five workstreams after meeting civil service unions. One of them is dedicated to emergency measures to raise the lowest salaries, the most immediate operational fix on the table for a pay system whose mechanics are visibly failing to keep pace with the legal minimum wage.
The five tracks, detailed by the Prime Minister on X, cover emergency revaluation of low pay, a structural reform of the salary scales, pay equality between women and men, coverage of certain transport costs, stronger protection for agents who are injured or threatened, and protection of the neutrality and independence of civil servants. Lecornu will receive the unions again on 11 December, after the professional elections in the civil service, with the stated aim of sealing advances by mid-December. That timetable leaves roughly four weeks for the government and the eight representative organisations to convert a diagnostic conversation into measures that change pay packets.
The meeting itself was long in coming. Union representatives of the 5.8 million public agents had asked to meet the head of government, and the request went unanswered for a long time before finally being granted. The discussion began around 9:30 on Friday, with all eight organisations present, including CGT general secretary Sophie Binet. A letter from the Prime Minister to the unions had framed the purpose as examining, as a priority, the concrete measures likely to improve the situation of public agents, with particular attention to those on the most modest incomes.
The operational problem at the heart of the dispute is well documented. Public sector base pay is set by salary grids, and each time the statutory minimum wage is raised it catches up with and overtakes the lowest public salaries, producing what is called a “tassement”: categories of agents slightly above the minimum find themselves aligned with the raised Smic. Because the law forbids any pay below the minimum, hundreds of thousands of agents whose base salary sits under that threshold must receive a compensatory allowance, known as the differential allowance. Following the minimum wage increase announced in June, 862,000 agents received it. After the new boost announced on Monday, more than a million could qualify. According to estimates by the collective of agents Le Sens du service public, 1.1 million agents, nearly 20 percent of the total, receive a base salary below the Smic.
Union leaders describe the situation as unprecedented. “To my knowledge this is unheard of and it is the consequence of the salary policies conducted over the past 10 years,” said Caroline Chevé, general secretary of the FSU. Christian Grolier of Force ouvrière fonction publique called the differential allowance a “double penalty” for its beneficiaries: “they remain smicards and lose for the future because they do not contribute on a salary that corresponds to the Smic.” Bercy, when asked, did not provide the exact number of agents whose base salary would fall below the legal minimum and who would therefore be compensated.
The government’s room for manoeuvre is constrained by its own earlier decisions. As early as July, the executive had ruled out a general increase and announced the freeze, for a fourth consecutive year, of the value of the index point on which public agents’ base pay is calculated. Public Accounts Minister David Amiel had cited a tight budgetary context, with the public deficit expected to reach 5.4 percent of GDP in 2026. A uniform 1 percent increase in the index point would cost the state 2.4 billion euros, which his cabinet said was “not envisageable”.
Meanwhile, the political pressure has been building through successive stoppages. After strikes on 29 September and 5 November, all union organisations called for a strike on 17 November, including the two main civil service federations, the CGT and Force ouvrière. Initial meetings at Bercy this week produced no satisfaction for most unions, and the Matignon meeting took on the appearance of a last chance. The CFDT, which had not joined the initial call, announced after the meeting that it too was calling for a public sector strike on 17 November. “The government still refuses to unlock budgetary means commensurate with the continued loss of purchasing power of agents,” the third-largest union force in the civil service wrote, denouncing proposals that “do not constitute genuine advances” while hundreds of thousands of agents will still have base salaries below the Smic. Leaving Matignon on Friday, the intersyndicale called it “a meeting for nothing”.
One concrete track remains on the table. The executive could raise the base salaries of the lowest-paid agents who currently receive compensation to reach the Smic threshold, allowing a number of them to exit the allowance scheme without earning more than the minimum wage. David Amiel sketched this option in early October, when it would have moved some 400,000 beneficiaries out of the scheme, a figure that is no longer current since Monday’s boost to the Smic. Whether the December deadline produces a working measure, or another round of strikes, will be settled within weeks.