Is absenteeism higher in the public and private sectors than among the self-employed?

The president of the CPME, François Asselin, deplores the increase in absenteeism in the public and private sectors, while sick leave is costly for health insurance.

The Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises (CPME) denounces tax increases “disguised” for VSEs and SMEs while the government seeks to save 40 billion euros in public spending in the 2025 budget and plans to revise exemptions from social charges and aid for hiring apprentices.

On franceinfo, Tuesday October 8, François Asselin, the president of the CPME, instead invites the government to make savings by aligning the number of waiting days for the public and the private sector. Currently, when they take time off for health reasons, public employees only have one day of waiting without pay or compensation, while the private sector has three.

🔴➡️ “We see that short-term sick leave is in high inflation. Are the French in sugar: as soon as there is a drop they start to melt? I don’t think so. We have lost the notion of the common good”, says François Asselin, president of the CGPME. pic.twitter.com/t8cN0b6GvT

— franceinfo (@franceinfo) October 8, 2024

François Asselin is surprised by the differences in absenteeism between the public, the private sector and the traders, craftsmen, self-employed and liberal professions that he represents. “The rate of absenteeism in the public sector is 15 days on average. In the private sector, it’s 12 days. When you are self-employed, business leaders – there are four million of them in France anyway – it’s two and a half days”he said before joking: “If you want to be healthy, become self-employed.”

The figures given by the president of the CPME are true. They can in fact be found in two reports. For independents. François Asselin affirms that they are absent only two and a half days per year for health reasons and this is in fact a figure that we can find by doing a little calculation, from the latest report of the Council of the social protection of self-employed workers. According to this report, Health Insurance compensated 12.1 million days in 2022 for self-employed workers. If we relate this number of days compensated to the number of traders, craftsmen, self-employed people – 4.3 million – we find in fact two and a half days of work stoppage compensated per year and per person on average.

However, these are only days of sick leave that are compensated, whereas as we have seen, self-employed workers have three waiting days before being compensated. To be completely rigorous and to be able to estimate the number of days of sick leave compensated or not by the self-employed, it is necessary to include in this calculation an estimate of the number of waiting days. In 2022, 228,830 self-employed people received compensation from Health Insurance. We can assume that everyone had three days of absence and estimate that there were therefore nearly 690,000 uncompensated days of absence. 12,100,000 + 690,000, that’s 12,790,000 days of absence for health reasons in 2022, or almost three days of absence per year. This is always more or less what François Asselin said.

This estimate has its limits, however, because it does not make it possible to count absences of one day, two days, or three days which were not followed by compensation. An important limit to keep in mind when comparing the absenteeism of the self-employed to that of the public and private sectors, which we discuss below, because the estimates which follow also take into account very short stops which have not been not been followed by compensation.

François Asselin says that public officials are absent “15 days on average” for health reasons per year, “12 days” for private sector employees. This figure can be found in several reports and in particular in the Expenditure Review relating to the reduction of absences in the public service, published last July by the General Inspectorate of Finance. This report is based on the Employment study carried out by INSEE to collect data on the world of work.

The IGF calculated “on average 14.5 days of absence for health reasons during the year [2022] per public official compared to 11.7 days per private sector employee”which is approximately what the president of the CPME declared. On the other hand, there are strong differences between the three sides of the civil service: there are 10.2 days of absence for health reasons per year on average for state civil service agents excluding teachers (FPE ), 11.7 days for teachers, 17.1 days for territorial public service agents (FPT) and 18.1 days for hospital public service agents (FPH). Indicators increasing between 2019 and 2022, years marked by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The General Inspectorate of Finance explains that this gap between absenteeism in the public sector and absenteeism in the private sector is mainly due to the characteristics of public agents. There are more women, more single-parent families, more people with chronic illnesses in the public sector than in the private sector, and these populations stop working more than men, families with several parents or people in good health. health. There is also more job stability in the public sector, which makes it easier to take time off when you are sick.

With an equal profile, the gap would be reduced between the two sectors. “With identical job structures, for the above-mentioned characteristics, the FPE, the FPH and the private sector would be at the same level of absenteeism and the gap between the FPT and the private sector would only be half of that observed”underlines the IGF.