Brutal management, dismissed agents, anti-union repression... What's happening at INSEE?

Brutal management, arbitrary measures against union activists... At the statistics institute under the Ministry of Finance, staff representatives are denouncing growing abuses. At the heart of the criticism: the practices of Secretary General and former MP Karine Berger, accused of authoritarianism and a desire to subdue. She denies this.

"Get out, you're fired!" an INSEE executive was told by his line manager, Karine Berger, the secretary general. © Riccardo Milani / Hans Lucas / Hans Lucas via AFP

After forty-two years of service at the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies ( INSEE ), Pascal ^I could have hoped, on the eve of retirement, for a more honourable epilogue to his prolific career within the department reporting to the Ministry of Finance. The man who presents himself as "a pure product of INSEE" was already imagining a farewell party in the form of a grand finale.

Yet it was a broken man who, in April 2024, abruptly left this "house" whose ranks he had climbed since his entry in 1982 as a statistical attaché, passing through various functions, up to this last post of superintendent within the Sesam division.

For a year, the young retiree has been reliving the memory of April 4, 2024, when everything changed. That day, Karine Berger , the secretary general of INSEE, his "N + 2," berated him in front of the twenty people present in the reception hall of the institute. His "fault": not having anticipated the long queue that overflowed outside the building. Busy at the time with a more urgent matter, it had taken his boss too long to go downstairs to resolve the problem.

"Get out of here, you're fired!" she shouts at him after a barrage of reproaches.