“The important thing is to telework”: Île-de-France employees encouraged to stay at home during the 2024 Olympics

During the Olympic Games, “the important thing is to telework”: the slogan has been displayed since Monday in various train and metro stations in Île-France, one more incentive while transport in the Ile-de-France region is often presented as the Achilles heel of the sporting event. With this new government campaign, Ile-de-France workers are warned, but not necessarily surprised. For several months, to avoid the embolism of the RER, buses and metro this summer, the former Minister of Transport Clément Beaune and the president of the region Valérie Pécresse have been urging “all those who can to telework” during the Olympic Games, from July 26 to August 11.

Because the risk is real: in a letter revealed by Le Canard Enchaîné, the prefect of the region Marc Guillaume warns that “the saturation thresholds will be regularly exceeded” during the Games for 11 metro lines, five RER lines and five Transiliens. Already twelve years ago, long before the world was forced to convert to teleworking during the Covid pandemic, a third of London workers had to stay at home to relieve public transport. For civil servants (there are more than a million in Île-de-France), a circular from Elisabeth Borne in November already gave the color.

While agreements in the public service provide for a maximum of three teleworking days per week, the former Prime Minister recommended going beyond, relying on an article authorizing it in the context of “exceptional circumstances”. Some unions are offended. “For us, exceptional circumstances are natural disasters, epidemics, unpredictable things that we cannot control,” judges the co-general secretary of the CGT of State Agents, Céline Verzeletti. “This should not become a precedent and what was exceptional and derogatory should become the rule.” In addition to teleworking, ministries will be able to decide on working hours and impose leave. Public employees will also be authorized to place more days of leave than usual in their time savings account (CET) in 2024.

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On the business side, many of those interviewed by AFP do not yet have a finalized plan. But they all say they are working seriously on the subject. “We think well in advance because we do not want teleworking to be suffered by default, like what we experienced during Covid,” explains the president of the Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises (CPME) Parisian, Bernard Cohen-Hadad. For him, good practices are now well integrated: “We know that there must not be overwork, that we must ensure that we do not become isolated, that employees do not stay at home and see each other again after a while.”

If teleworking is not possible, other solutions are considered. “The idea is not to say that all companies in France will be teleworking, that will not be possible,” judges Clotilde Yeatman, responsible for sustainable development and mobility at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) Île. -of France. For example, she recommends the use of staggered schedules, in order to smooth out flows. But, be careful: “We are used to peak hours in the morning and evening, but with the Olympics, certain networks will be saturated at periods that are not necessarily instinctive, such as in the middle of the afternoon around the Stade de France,” warns Clotilde Yeatman.

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There is no consensus on the government's incentive to telework, particularly among hoteliers and restaurateurs. “For us, it is serious to call for teleworking. These are fewer customers,” regrets Franck Delvau, president of the Union of Hotel Trades and Industries (UMIH) Paris Île-de-France. “We saw what this looked like during Covid. Restaurants, cafes and bars found themselves without customers in certain neighborhoods,” he continues.

And it is not certain that foreign tourists will fill this shortfall. “We are only told of 1.1 million foreign tourists, but in Paris, in a normal summer, there are more than three million,” he recalls. In the United Kingdom, the number of foreign tourists was 5% lower in August 2012 than in 2011, during the London Olympic Games, according to the British Office of National Statistics (ONS).