Local authority staff up 40%

THE NUMBER of local civil servants in France has soared by 40 per cent in a decade, and continues to grow despite the economic crisis, creating 656,000 new jobs.

Official new figures show that, while central ministries have cut back, mairies, departmental and regional councils have been on a hiring spree.

The report also reveals that civil servants’ pay continues to outpace inflation.

Local authorities created 70,000 jobs in 2008 alone and 656,000 since 1998, boosting the local civil service by 40 per cent over the decade to today’s total of 1.82 million workers.

Meanwhile, the central civil service cut 77,000 jobs last year, mostly through a policy of not replacing one in every two workers on retiremwnr.

The biggest cuts were in the education and ecology ministries.

Most of the newly created jobs at local level can be explained by Jacques Chirac’s 2003 decentralisation law, which shifted many responsibilities from central government to the regions, departments and individual communes.

However, the latest figures show that about a quarter of the new local authority jobs in the past decade are unconnected to the new devolved powers.

Hospitals, for example, hired an extra 10,000 people in 2008 and their workforce has risen by an average of 1.8 per cent every year for the past decade.

The official report reveals that the average civil servant takes home e2,328 a month, up 3.7 per cent in a year.

The total number of civil servants in France has stabilised in recent years after constant growth since the early 1980s.

The country employs 5.3 million public sector workers, representing 20.5 per cent of all the jobs in France.