(signature form in French; current list of signatories)
For months now, our institute has been badly treated by its management and has been suffering from dysfunctions that are totally unprecedented in their scope and multiplicity. We, members of INRIA’s departments and scientists, are deeply concerned about the dramatic deterioration of working conditions that has occurred for all employees, but also about the future of our institute.
Each of us is confronted daily with one or more of the following problems.
The CEO is misrepresenting INRIA’s main missions by presenting our institute as being above all “the armed wing of the State” whose primary mission would be to “reinforce the digital sovereignty of the Nation”.
“Research” has become a shameful word, to be erased from the facade of the buildings of all the centers. The new website of our institute seems to want to hide the scientific activities; it no longer allows direct access to the teams and hides the research themes of our institute. More generally, the communication policy is more like “influence”, totally detached from science.
The management of our institute has proved incapable of supporting important research themes, such as hardware architecture, software engineering, communication networks or distributed systems, going so far as to close down a key team in this field, Delys, despite its excellent scientific evaluation, without any consultation with the other institutional partners and by short-circuiting the internal committees (CE, BCP, CP).
Our institute did not play its role of scientific guarantor in the TousAntiCovid project. The scientific ethics required to evaluate the efficiency of the digital contact tracing and the benefit-risk balance. On the contrary, INRIA communicated only on the number of downloads and alerts sent, without verifying whether the alerts are actually sent to people at risk, and refusing to publish the other available data.
The CEO posted an initial excessive objective of 100 INRIA startup projects per year involving people from INRIA teams, then congratulates himself today for having reached 100 startup projects over 3 years, even though many of them have no connection with the research done at INRIA and some seem to have no scientific content whatsoever or even limited interest for society. Finally, the additional costs for INRIA’s budget of this blind support to startups are very opaque.
How can the management of a research institute mistreat science to such an extent?
The implementation of the new management software suite Eksaé is a real fiasco. The switch to this software was launched while it was not ready, forcing the colleagues who depend on it to juggle permanently with parallel entries. This has increased their workload considerably for many months. It was only in September 2022, nine months after the launch of the software, that the management took note of the dysfunctions and proposed a series of measures and a degraded mode of operation to relieve the staff. Among these measures, however, the promised restart of Epibud has still not taken place three months later.
While trying to operate unsuitable tools and a defective infrastructure, the agents have been experiencing exhausting time losses, the disintegration of work groups and the frustration of failure at work for months in their daily lives. Instead of the promised gain in performance and software efficiency, agents find themselves fixing things with odds and ends, and doing time-consuming tasks, to the detriment of those for which they have the skills.
Several promotion campaigns and internal competitions have been declared unsuccessful: the professional selections have only allowed 5 IRHC promotions out of 7 possible, the internal competitions have allocated 13 IE positions out of 14, 12 IR positions out of 17, and 8 TRS positions out of 10. This is a scandalous lack of recognition of the skills of administrative colleagues.
How could management have been so careless in choosing the provider yesterday? How could it deny the reality experienced by the agents for months? How could they despise their staff in this way?
Management keeps AGOS in a situation of dependence through late payments, by forcing it to renegotiate its subsidy every year, and by refusing to increase the subsidy to keep up with the increase in the number of employees, thus leading to a 20% drop in the subsidy per agent.
The occupational health coordinator at the national level resigned “for personal reasons” and “without giving any explanation” according to management, even though he had clearly explained to the CNHSCT and the CEO that management was making it impossible for him to do his job properly. While the number of people who “fall at work”, in a situation of suffering or burn out, is increasing, the management is in a state of denial, taking no concrete action. Faced with the persistence of serious and imminent dangers threatening the health of the personnel, several alerts had to be brought to the level of the ministerial CHSCT of July 12, 2022.
The attacks against the Evaluation Commission (CE) and the principle of peer evaluation are multiplying. The climate is such that the minutes of the last meeting between the CE and the managment team (DG) could not be published. After the publication of an opinion from the Ethics Council and a letter from its president contradicting the words of INRIA’s CEO on the mission on Conflicts of Interest that he had decided to launch, the setting up of this mission can now only be considered as a serious attempt to destabilize the CE.
How can management mistreat its bodies in this way? How can it ignore the numerous alerts from the personnel on the ill-being at work? How can it be satisfied with reacting by displaying a façade of “benevolence” and promising an imminent improvement while continuing to lie to the staff?
After boasting at the beginning of the year of an extraordinary budget, the CEO admitted at the end of the year that “the budgetary policy is not sustainable”: revenues had been greatly overestimated, and growth based solely on non-recurring revenues is worryingly obliterating any room for maneuver in the years to come.
The latest budget estimates foresee a deficit of 24 million in 2022 (€270 million in revenues for €294 million in expenditures), and a deficit of 27 million in 2023 (€307 million in revenues for €334 million in expenditures). Between 2018 and 2022, revenues increased by 13%, or 4% including inflation, while salaried staff increased by 27%.
The management of the institute has not presented the social report for 2021 (“rapport social unique”), which is however a legal obligation, depriving the Board of Directors of any assessment before the vote of the 2023 budget and depriving the supervisory authorities of an essential assessment before choosing a new CEO in early 2023.
How can management commit resources in this way over the long term, while taking the very risky gamble that the State will be obliged to provide funding? How can management jeopardize the future of the institute in this way?
The managment having validated the format of the application package far too late, the campaign for the researchers’ bonuses took place under unimaginable conditions, with a very short deadline for the candidates, deliberations that had to be postponed by a month in a hurry, and juries that were too tightly packed and held less than a week before the theoretical pay date.
After having stated that there would be no CRHC 8th step (échelon) promotion campaign this year, the managment had to organize a campaign in 2022. As a result, the campaign was carried out in the greatest confusion, putting the services under enormous pressure, which led to the drawing up of incomplete lists “forgetting” a part of the colleagues eligible for promotion.
Many colleagues, including guests and doctoral students, have been waiting for months for the reimbursement of their travel expenses (sometimes amounting to thousands of euros). Faced with these situations and in the absence of any prospect of improvement, one head of research center (DCR) mentioned the possibility of taking out interest-free loans from AGOS; in another center, a secretary general simply advised them to stop all work travel! People who have finished their fixed-term contracts are not given a work certificate on the day they leave, thus depriving them of their right to unemployment benefit for several months.
The international experts who participated in the team evaluations in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 (more than a hundred) are still waiting for the payment of their fees. The CE coordinators and the heads of the teams concerned are receiving letters that range from incredulity to virulence, creating a situation that is damaging the image and reputation of the institute.
Many other delays are to be reported in the payment of the indemnities of the members of the research competition juries, in the revaluation of the index point, in the sending of pay slips, interrupted for 5 months, as well as calculation errors made on the payroll. These dysfunctions, like the previous ones, are not attributable to the devoted and courageous colleagues of the services concerned, but to the pressure imposed on them, to the questionable prioritization of certain missions over others, and to the negation of the problems induced by the forced evolutions.
How can one not be stunned by the level of disorganization reached in an institute whose functioning was praised by its agents?
Whether they are major or minor, the dysfunctions cited here are only part of the problems that we have observed day after day since the appointment of the CEO. Contrary to what he would have us believe, these dysfunctions can no longer be attributed to choices made by his predecessors.
The numerous internal alerts have been met with management denial. The trust between the staff and the CEO is definitely broken. We ask our supervisory ministers to intervene to put an end to this destructive management of INRIA.
To save INRIA.