Twelve caregivers from the hospitals of Montargis, Pithiviers, and Orléans present a request for interim relief on Wednesday, October 27. They are asking for their reinstatement in their services, they who refused to be vaccinated and have therefore been suspended since September 15.
To support the request filed with the administrative court of Orléans, Sylvie Mazardo, the lawyer for several Loirétains caregivers, invokes the urgency of suspending the decision to remove them from their services. Because, she said, “They have not had any salary for a month and a half. And as they are suspended and not dismissed, they have no right to unemployment”. A situation that is all the more difficult to live with, according to her, “that they do not know if it will have an end, the law does not say anything about the term of this measure”.
The lawyer also invokes “the existence of a serious doubt about the legality of the contested decision”, this is one of the conditions for filing a summary suspension, as is the case this Wednesday. The magistrates of the administrative court will not rule on the merits of the case, which will be examined much later, but on these two points only. And on both, a first decision rendered a few days ago concerning caregivers in Bourges does not go in their direction : “the colon was rejected” says Sylvie Mazardo, “the court says there is no doubt about the legality, without developing any further”.
Without any salary since September 15th
This is not enough to reassure Françoise (her first name has been changed because she does not want to be recognized by her management), a nurse in a department of the Orléans hospital. She who hopes, by entering the administrative court like three other agents of the CHR of Orléans, “just to be listened to”, still has sobs in her voice when she recounts how she felt last September 15 when she was told she had to leave the service. “30 years of her life, we don’t leave her like that, even though we haven’t made any mistakes. We haven’t done anything”.
Françoise has heart problems and she is afraid to be vaccinated. But she claims to have never been able to explain her doubts and fears, neither in front of her employer, nor in front of her attending physician. : “I told her that I had heard of myocarditis, of pericarditis, that it really scared me. She said to me” I’m not arguing, get yourself vaccinated that’s all, I refuse to give you make a paper so that you are not. There was no discussion possible “.
A lacunar law according to the lawyer of Orleans carers
Since September 15, Françoise therefore no longer has a salary, and no prospects. “The problem is that we don’t know whether to look for work elsewhere, to change jobs, since they don’t tell us what we’re going to do with us. Me, to change jobs, see you. 50 years old, it’s going to be really complicated. But I think of my younger colleagues who could retrain, they don’t know anything “.
On this specific point, the law of August 5, 2021 is incomplete according to Françoise’s lawyer, Sylvie Mazardo: “There is no end to this suspension, and that is not normal. It puts people in a very difficult situation. Many of these caregivers are women, often single. Without any salary, without any compensation, some of them have had to return to their families because they have no means of subsistence “.
Françoise, she lives thanks to her husband’s salary. “It’s very complicated for me, I have always been independent, I was brought up like that”. The first court decisions concerning the vaccination obligation do not reassure her : “it’s worrying, I think, that means that as a citizen, we are not listened to, we no longer exist. But I say to myself that perhaps, one day, someone will say to himself that all this is not normal, that we could have done otherwise, take the time to talk to each other “.