They deplore the degradation of public service and its consequences for people. They are citizens on benefits or in solidarity with social rights for all.
But also people involved in the group of unemployed and precarious people of the House of World Citizenship affiliated to the MNCP (National Movement of Unemployed and Precarious), AU68 (united associations), Right to Housing (DAL), Right and Poverty , RSA Grand Est, and the Archipelago of the Voiceless.
Since spring they have been addressing CAF administrators. And want to be understood and respected, in a climate of trust and while the obligations of the public administration are flouted.
Only rarely having the opportunity to meet with its management in order to explain the problems encountered by beneficiaries, they find that the public service has most often become an inhuman and deaf system.
In doing so, they remind CAF that housing, income, health, education, culture are fundamental rights. Or the opposite of charity.
Faced with this barrier of incomprehension and in the absence of a real dialogue, when people and families are subject to decisions on a daily basis, often without appeal and with serious and degrading consequences, and when meetings with CAF services are judged “inconclusive“,
Meetings spread over a semester with the CAF services made it possible to examine the situations suffered by the beneficiaries, associations and social workers of the CEA. But they gave birth to a mouse, and ended up with an unfortunate statement that said: “ it’s up to people to get used to the logic of the systems, and then we’ll get to them better ”.
After an interview with CAF officials during the first demonstration, they admitted that “The system is bad”, while being satisfied with the method of physical contact between beneficiaries and agents.
However, according to the demonstrators, it would rather be a question of getting used to a logic of the dematerialization of a public service, and to silences regularly opposed to the beneficiaries as well as to the social workers who request them in vain.
For all these reasons, they decided to mobilize regularly. Thus, every first Tuesday of the month will see a rally in front of the Haut-Rhin Family Allowance Fund (Caf).
This was the case, this Tuesday, September 7, 2021.
As such, the demonstrators demand better human contact, denounce the permanent and degrading controls, the prejudices spread against them, even by ministers, about the back-to-school allowance, which sociologist Vincent Dubois confirms. , in his book Control the assisted, genesis and uses of a slogan.
Protesters also demand that the public service respect ESSOC law (on the right to make mistakes) and the Code of relations between the public and the administrations, and in particular the obligation to process files in the consideration of people.
They plead for a minimum living income, point out the growing digital divide between benefit recipients, denounce the cuts or even the abolition of housing assistance since the start of the reform of the method of calculation, while the incomes of individuals or families have not not changed.
In the event of a review of rights, they also denounce the illegal abolition of allowances which may last several months before their reinstatement.
Finally, they are calling for an audit on the social and financial effectiveness of CAFs.
If the direction of CAF also deplores a “lack of means” and admits the need “to work together ”, protesters expect verifiable acts more than declarations of intent.
Glimmer of hope ? Still, Jacques Rimeize, president of the Haut-Rhin family allowance fund, and departmental secretary of Force Ouvrière, says he is ready to receive a delegation next Tuesday. He also recalls the existence of a commission created by him, which brings together social workers from CAF, those from CCAS (communal social action centers) and representatives of the unemployed.
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