Public Services: Liberty, Equality, Profitability? - Cash Investigation

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Public Services: Liberty, Equality, Profitability? - Cash Investigation
Hospitals, schools, prefectures, our public services employ nearly 5 million agents. Elise Lucet and the Cash Investigation team decided to investigate the practices of France’s largest employer, the State. If you thought job stability, easy jobs, and guaranteed salaries, forget it. What we are going to reveal is far from these clichés.
The State has to cut its budgets. To reduce the costs, it increasingly resorts to subcontracting, particularly in the most sensitive sectors like healthcare. A few months before the coronavirus crisis, Cash Investigation investigated the daily life of hospital cleaning staff. While they are more than ever on the front line, their working conditions are alarming.
Our journalist Marie Maurice got hired as a cleaning lady by one of the French giants of cleaning. Her mission: to disinfect the rooms of one of the largest public hospitals in France. And what she discovered there is worrying: rushed training, hellish work rates, and equipment shortages. In a world where strict hygiene and the fight against nosocomial infections, those diseases contracted in hospitals, should be an absolute priority, the reliance on subcontracting raises questions.
To save even more money, the State would not hesitate to break the law. Cash Investigation unveils the hidden workers of Civic Service… Tens of thousands of young people receive an allowance below the legal minimum wage and do not contribute to unemployment benefits. But in some administrations like Pôle Emploi or the prefectures, these civic service workers do a real job or sometimes replace public agents, which is normally illegal.