The dismantling of the social state

The withdrawal of the State, which we have witnessed since the 1980s, he signs the end of the public service ? To this question, Nadège Vezinat provides a nuanced answer: public service would rather be “ prevented ». In a dense book, the sociologist engages in a detailed diagnosis, nourished by her own research on post and the now numerous work on the difficulties encountered by public services for several decades.

Nadège Vezinat’s work carefully documents the “ vicious circle “Which risks leading public services to their” dusk “, And that the author had already presented here. In the name of state deleveraging, public services are subject to a profitability requirement which leads to their degradation, which makes them both less effective and less profitable, which motivates their privatization at least partial and leads to the segmentation of the public, always more requested to take charge of the cost of the services offered to them.

It is necessary to underline the difficulty of the company initiated by the author, which involves holding together multiple processes, often contradictory, rarely readable. In the name of the reduction of the public deficit, the reforms have indeed multiplied, at different levels: redefinition of public service missions, institutional transformations of their operators, increasing introduction of public/private partnerships, changes in the statutes of agents, implementation of new forms of work organization, etc. To account for it, Nadège Vezinat chooses to take an interest above all in their effects-on the public services themselves, on the people responsible for their implementation, on beneficiaries and users. It thus reports on the gaping gap which separates on the one hand the principles in the name of which these reforms are carried out and on the other their consequences on public services.

The pretenses of economic rationalization

The author insists more particularly on economic public services (postal, transport, energy, etc.), struggling with contradictory injunctions. On the one hand, the reduction of the public deficit requires them to be profitable, that is to say to produce a profit, or at least to balance their expenses and revenues. On the other, they are placed in a situation where they can only be in deficit. Certain costs are imposed on them by their public service missions, to maintain infrastructure or maintain activities at a loss, because they affect poorly populated territories or poor populations. But most of the recipes they could garner are captured by others: private companies taking advantage of opening up to competition from such or such service to skim its carriers, the state itself when it takes samples from their surpluses.

Nadège Vezinat observes similar phenomena in social and non -economic public services (social security, public education, etc.). The concern for cost rationalization sometimes leads to devices that tend to increase public expenditure. In hospital, for example, the reduction in the number of holding hospital practitioners is for counterpart the explosion of temporary vacations, while the restrictions affecting prevention policies lead to an additional cost linked to the management of pathologies that could have been avoided. More generally, reforms would tend to encourage short -term savings to the detriment of investments necessary for longer -term budgetary balances.

In the same vein of ideas, the opening to competition of services of general economic interest, presented by its craftsmen as virtuous, benefits less to the public sector than in the private sector, and, within the private sector, to certain companies more than others. The author shows very finely that in fact of liberalization, we are rather dealing with a process of oligopolization, which allows some private players to take advantage of a niche competition, without having to invest in the infrastructure or to submit to the imperatives of universality and accessibility specific to the public service.

The introduction of New Public Management does not seem more profitable. Competition under cover of emulation and excellence, in their use or to respond to calls for tenders, public services agents tend to devote more time to administrative tasks than to the satisfaction of users, to postpone to them some of the tasks and costs hitherto supported by the public service, even to sacrifice the interests of the beneficiaries for the benefit of their own professional advancement, sometimes clearly disconnected from the services returned.

The last chapter insists on the suffering at work caused by these changes in many agents, who have generally turned to these jobs in the name of the public service and who are now “ prevented By these new budgetary constraints and managerial standards. Whether they or they chain sickness stops for professional exhaustion, withdraw or resign, the result is the same: far from making public services more efficient, new management methods tend to make them dysfunctional. Perhaps it should be added that from this angle, the private sector is not better off ?

Nadège Vezinat remains very cautious about the role of the European Union as on intentions presiding over these manifestly counterproductive measures. At the end of its demonstration, one can however only wonder about the reasons displayed: if it was a question of improving the management of public money by certainly reducing expenses, but by making them more effective, why not recognize, after so many years of experimentation, that the remedy was ultimately worse than evil ? How to imagine, in democratic societies, that those responsible for these unsuccessful policies did not have to be accountable and are still in power ?

Because, as the author points out several times, it is indeed a political choice, that of privatizing a certain number of expenses rather than pooling them, in the name of economic reason. When we compare the health expenses of the United States and France, we have something to doubt: the first are reluctant to pool, spend more per capita, for a life expectancy that declines, and they would have to follow their steps ? This is all the interest of Nadège Vezinat’s book to take the managerial argument seriously to confront him with his own limits and contradictions.

Save public service

Nadège Vezinat is of course not fooled. In a world where the small music of individual responsibility plays against the backdrop of questioning and denigration of civil servants, the objective is less the good management of public services than the dismantling of the social state, whatever it costs. Without always saying this explicitly, the book thus raises the question of the foundations of the public service: in the name of which we demand the collective management of services which allow the effective maintenance of social rights for all (access to a minimum income, to care, to education and to culture) ? The dignity of the human person ? Social integration ? Legality ? The three at a time ?

What this work shows is that the political project underlying the existence of public services tends to lose readability, including among some of their most ardent defenders. Nadège Vezinat seems to say that this scrambling is essentially due to the multiplication of private operators, associations or companies, who ensure more and more missions of general interest, to the conditions of the private sector. It thus delivers, most often in hollow, a defense of the public service provided by the State, by agents under the status of the public service – in the Wéberian sense, namely recruited by competition, for life, according to a career determined by advancement grids fixed in advance. Subtractive from market rules as well as political pressures, these officials can better than any other meet the requirements of the public service: impersonality, impartiality, universality.

THE “ renewed solidarism That the author calls for her wishes therefore seems to go through the state, which, in the name of the interdependence of individuals, would intervene to equalize the chances, in a context where the social position of some opened doors to them that the chance of birth closed to others. Nadège Vezinat defends a “ proportionate universalism “, According to which equal access to public services is accompanied by specific policies for the benefit of the most vulnerable, to ensure the effectiveness of their social rights.

The proposal, even quickly formulated – is not the object of the work, essentially devoted to making a diagnosis on the current state of public services – seems particularly intellectually and politically stimulating. References to solidarism or the invention of public service indeed refer to France from the end of XIX^e century, where state intervention is above all regulatory and public services largely assumed locally, by non-profit private groups, by departmental or municipal public establishments or by the municipality itself (through the “ municipal socialism »). The challenge is then rather to subject any service to the public – whether insured through private or public funding, by private or public agents – to standards of action and management controlled by the State.

From there, the two questions that come to us by closing the book. The first concerns the illegibility of public service principles. Does it really come from the co-existence of private and public operators ensuring this type of missions ? It should not be also and above all attribute it essentially to the weakening of legal and legal standards governing activities of general interest, regardless of the status of their animators and the origin of their funding ? The second was linked with the first. If public services have been in danger for more than twenty years, it is not also because the intermediate bodies have in parallel undergoing unprecedented attacks ? Wouldn’t they be more resistant to the work of the neoliberal state if they were co-worn by the social partners and the associative world, really shared, in their management, as in their funding ?