“In my team, everyone had eczema, I was doing tachycardia. We all had in common weeks of 60, 70, 80 hours, days that started at 9 am and finished at 2 am ”describes Ariane (all first names have been changed), a recently part of EY after spending five years there.
In this company of 3,000 employees, who checks the accounts of large companies, work overload is a constant. According to a survey led by the CFDT-CGTC-FO inter-union in early 2023 to 218 people, 25 % of employees declared to exceed 50 hours weekly more than twenty weeks per year, and almost 90 % at least five weeks.
It is in this context that the inter -union announced the launch of a referendum: from April 14 to 21, employees will be invited to indicate, via a link which will be sent to them on LinkedIn, if they wish to restore the weekly limit of working time at 48 hours.
In question, a company agreement, signed in 2021 between management and the only CFE-CGC, in the majority era, which allowed managers to exceed the maximum number of hours provided by the collective agreement, to adapt to periods of high activity, especially at the start of the year.
The text confirms the possibility of exceeding 48 hours, since it creates thresholds at 50 and 58 hours: if an employee exceeds them for several weeks close in time, human resources must intervene to lighten the workload. Few employees have been really helped after declaring periods higher than these thresholds.
“I have already been asked to work on sick leave”
The inter -union disputed in court, then tried to renegotiate the agreement with the management, without success. It cannot denounce it, for lack of support from the CFE-CGC, which remains a representative union despite a drop in the last professional elections. Without further details, management indicates that social dialogue “Made it possible to adapt the rules of the company to its environment, and many developments have thus emerged”.
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