The municipal syndicate FGFC is raising concerns about a creeping privatisation of municipal services that it says is being carried out through the back door. On the surface and on paper, while everything remains in public hands and no major reforms have been announced, through a series of decisions, attempts are under way to undermine the very foundations of the public service, according to FGFC President Claude Reuter.
Municipalities are being given more tasks, but are not always able to carry them out, says Claude. He added, services outsourced to external providers – in effect privatised – were becoming increasingly common, citing areas such as energy, transport and Maisons Relais, Luxembourg’s publicly funded after-school childcare centres.
Reuter further warned that an increasing number of communal facilities were being privatised, leading to uneven standards between municipalities. In his view, public authorities, as with schools, should aim to guarantee the same level of service everywhere, rather than allowing the quality of provision for children to depend on whether a municipality has more or less financial means.
The syndicate is concerned about quality, control and reliability, warning that these issues are becoming more pronounced as privatisation expands.
The union said it was particularly concerned about posts advertised as salarié à tâche intellectuelle (a private-law employment status for specialist or non-manual roles), for example in the socio-educational sector. According to the FGFC, this leads to significant inequalities and contravenes the unified public-service statute.
Reuter continued: “The situation is that we are now hiring people under a patchwork of conditions that no longer guarantee the same pay for the same job. This also creates problems related to pensions. Because these people are hired on a private-law basis, so those benefits are naturally missing as well.”
The syndicate president explained that tailor-made conditions are being created which circumvent the public service pay scale. The FGFC is of the opinion that laws are being broken and emphasised that the statutes must be strictly adhered to. In addition to this, the FGFC announed that legal reviews are currently under way.
The FGFC confirmed that the union would submit definitive figures to substantiate these developments next year.
