2023-11-10 10:42:24
“Linchpin of public action”, “essential link”, “key cog”… That is how senators talk about town hall secretaries in June 2023, when they unanimously vote on a bill to upgrade this profession. This text arrives in session at the National Assembly this Monday, November 13, under the attentive and critical eye of Karine Follin, town hall secretary in Tourneville in Normandy.
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His small office just behind the front door of the town hall is strewn with folders. An orange for the 2024 census, a green for the future bike route, envelopes to open, files to study… “There’s everything but it’s an organized mess”, she laughed. If there is everything, as she says, it’s because her job makes her do a little bit of everything in this small town of 340 inhabitants. In the community, the synonym for town hall secretary is “Swiss knife” !
Karine Follin is in difficulty when it comes to recounting a typical day. “When you arrive, you have to check the mailbox, respond when you can or start searching, take note of the paper mail, which also needs to be studied. At the same time, there is the accounting to follow, especially in small towns since we work a lot with small local craftsmen, we cannot leave the bills to be paid lying around. On top of that, we have things that come up periodically: budgets every year, elections… There, I have the census in 2024, we have to start preparing for it. So finally, in the morning when we arrive, apart from everything that involves mail, we don’t really have any instructions for the day, we can’t have a schedule to follow, it “It’s impossible, let’s be careful!”
What can a day as a town hall secretary look like?
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Which makes her work as exciting as it is tiring, smiles this woman, now 58 years old. Thin glasses screwed onto her nose, very short hair, Karine Follin loves her job. This eldest of a family of three, who grew up with one foot in Anjou and the other in Alsace, nevertheless dreamed of something else as a teenager. She was attracted “by the medical community” and wanted to be “nurse in operating room”. She attempted the nursing school entrance exam twice, unfortunately without success. “I forfeited”she assumes today.
From the state civil service to the territorial civil service
Change of program and direction of La Poste. Like his parents, who are civil servants there. In Maine-et-Loire, she worked as a contract agent for almost eight years, performing replacements throughout the department: counter, postwoman, cleaning lady, sorting center. And then she resigns, to follow her partner to Normandy.
While looking for work in La Haye-Malherbe where she now lives, she came across an ad: her town was looking for a town hall secretary to take over from the one who is retiring. The mayor organizes a “mini competition” to decide between the candidates, with “quite a tough dictation and the writing of an administrative letter”, it probes their mastery of French, both written and spoken. And Karine Follin, 27 years old at the time, wins! “That’s where it all started.”.
At the time, without any training, Karine Follin discovered her profession while practicing it. “The big surprise,” she remembers, “was the versatility of the tasks”. Between welcoming the public, helping with administrative procedures, developing budgets, managing accounting and public procurement, subsidy files, town planning, civil status, etc. “I admit that the beginnings were a little hot”, underlines the town hall secretary. But she got used to all these hats and enjoyed it to the point of staying there for 17 years, before starting to get a little tired.
Recalled by town halls
She then decides to take a break. This passionate about new technologies is giving herself two years to try to retrain in computer coding. Except that local elected officials don’t quite see it that way! “During these two years, town halls called me for replacements. And one thing led to another, I got back on the horse and went back to the town halls. But with much more perspective and firmness in my approach. I I chose small communities to have a little more autonomy and discover another way of working”welcomes Karine Follin.
There is no shortage of small communities looking for town hall secretaries! Karine Follin easily finds several positions and combines them “to reach almost a full time”. She thus sails between different communes of the Eure before landing in Tourneville. And only Tourneville. She works there 28 hours a week. “At 58, it’s enough, because I’m a little worn out anyway. There is psychological fatigue at the end of my career. Because being a town hall secretary is 24 hours a day. can’t disconnect, we always think about something that we’ve started and not finished, we get a phone call from the mayor or a deputy to tell us that there has been a death and that we have to come, organizing elections, budgets, it’s stressful. It’s not easy. Especially when you love your job, it’s exhausting!” she admits.
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To love this job, she loves it. She even created in 2019 with a few colleagues the Association of rural town hall secretaries of France. “We had a lot of phone calls from right to left asking us for information, as we were old in the industry, we often turned to us. And we said to ourselves that if one or two secretaries in the neighborhood needed information, there had to be others at the national level. So we set up the association so that everyone could have access to information.”.
This investment earned him named Knight of the National Order of Merit last year. Not without emotion. “It is very impressive” she said humbly.
In thirty years of experience, she has seen her job change
All this does not prevent him from regretting some developments. “The problem is that with dematerialization, we have lost a lot of contact. Even with administrations, everything is done by email. And then what has also changed a lot is the public’s vision of us. People pay their taxes online, manage their bills over the internet. As a result, when they come to town hall, we have the feeling of being taken for a machine. We owe them everything right away. They come looking for information, “We’re supposed to have it. That’s the part that’s become more unpleasant now than before.”.
“There have been a lot of changes, and not necessarily for the better”
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And that doesn’t help attract candidates, even if for her, the problem lies elsewhere. “The skills you need to have are so heavy that it’s scary. Many don’t realize what the real work represents once they’re in the job. And then there’s the financial side. When we see the work required and remuneration at the same time – less than 11 euros net per hour in category C – we can clearly see that there is a gap that separates us from the private sector”.
This is also one of the points of the bill expected Monday in the Assembly. The text aims, among other things, to encourage internal promotion, from category C to category B. “Insufficient” for Karine Follin. “Why plan to facilitate promotion, and not appoint them directly to category B?” she wonders.
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Adopted unanimously in the Senate, the text at least has the merit of highlighting this little-known profession, occupied more than 90% by women, but which therefore struggles to attract new candidates. Today, nearly 2,000 positions are vacant, and it is estimated that there will be almost 10,000 to be renewed by 2030, since a third of current agents are approaching retirement. Karine Follin is one of them and she admits, she waits with a little impatience for departure time!
Time for debate
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