Tele-work-parenting, confined vacation or paid furlough: You have the choice!

Whether you call it a new confinement or a “reinforcement of braking measures”, one thing is certain: parents are once again confronted with working at home with their children present. We’ve been here before and the experience didn’t leave fond memories.

To avoid a repetition of the first confinement in the spring of 2020, the government has, after a bit of confusion, opened the paid furlough scheme to parents who can’t take care of their children and work from home at the same time. While this is certainly the case for parents of young children, as many parents have discovered, working at home and remote schooling with primary school-age children can be incompatible as well.

AFP’s management announced last week that staff can be put on paid furlough and it will complement the state’s payments to ensure no loss of salary, but that “use of vacation time should be privileged whenever possible”. In other words, paid furlough should never be used except for AFP staff who used all of their 2021 vacation time in the first three months of the year? Such people must be few and far between.

So, once again, we have an unclear situation which will certainly be disadvantageous to staff who are already under considerable stress.

So everyone may find the best solution for themselves during this time, SUD would like to state clearly to staff that they can request paid furlough even if they have vacation time available, which management indirectly confirmed to unions following our open letter on Wednesday. If paid furlough is the best option for you — ask your supervisor.

We invite staff who encounter any refusals to contact us, even though we don’t doubt that the spirit of dialog, flexibility and benevolence of AFP managers will help avoid any problems.

However, SUD deplores the apparent unwillingness of management to negotiate with trade unions about paid furlough for stringers, who are in the most precarious situation among us. Some may see their revenue drop due to the confinement measures while others may need paid furlough to look after their children. We believe they should have access to fully paid furlough like the rest of AFP staff.

We call for the immediate opening of negotiations on access to paid furlough for stringers, employees who are essential for AFP’s success in its mission to inform the public.

Defend our working conditions!

Paris, 8 April, 2021
SUD-AFP (Solidarity-Unity-Democracy)
contact@sud-afp.org

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