“47% of our business leaders earn a little less than the minimum wage”, declares the general secretary of the Union of Independents and VSEs

Marc Sanchez, general secretary of the Union of Independents and VSEs, was Franceinfo’s eco guest on Monday to discuss the health of very small businesses.

How are very small businesses doing? How are the self-employed, craftsmen and traders? Marc Sanchez, general secretary of the Union of Independents (SDI) and Very Small Enterprises (TPE) which represents companies with fewer than 20 employees and has 25,000 members, was Franceinfo’s eco guest to answer these questions.

franceinfo: What state of mind are these leaders of very small businesses in at the end of the year?

Marc Sanchez: If I were pessimistic, I would say very, very affected, without much prospect in terms of development or turnover. Generally speaking, indeed, we have business leaders who are almost at the end of their rope, but who still remain a little resilient. If I am optimistic, in fact, what we look at in our barometer is that we see that there are almost more than half who still remain quite confident for the 2024 financial year. to economic factors, but confident because they have no choice, because often, in fact, their business is their life. They have invested a lot of personal money, time, energy, ideas and therefore obviously, we have no choice in going back. We can only move forward. So from this point of view, we will say that we must remain optimistic.

Is inflation reflected in the prices charged by companies that belong to your union?

In the last barometer, we noted that it was passed on at less than 30%, that is to say that many VSE managers considered that they were not under a certain obligation to pass it on, to fear of having reductions in consumption or reductions in construction sites in particular. So, it is often supported by the margins or by the cash flow of companies, in the hope that it will take off again. And this is unfortunately not what is happening today with prospects for 2024. If we look in particular at the latest macro statistics from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) which are still quite complicated .

And what about the remuneration of the directors of the companies you represent? ?

Here too, our barometer showed last October that in fact we still had 47% of our business leaders, traders, craftsmen, liberal professions and VSE managers who earned a little less than the minimum wage in 2023, at around 800 or 900 euros per month, taking into account working 48 hours a week, which is still relatively important. And indeed, we explain these elements by the fact that the business manager is so pressed by charges that he actually prefers to use what remuneration he may have left to be able to pay charges in particular. I am thinking of the State Guaranteed Loan (PGE) in particular. Many actually tell us that it is an element that weighs down companies’ remuneration and margins. Even though initially, it was still considered as aid which should allow us to emerge from the covid crisis. Today, we have the impression that he is pushing us deeper and deeper. You have to see that the PGE today, for a company, a florist, a baker, is 2,000 euros per month to be repaid over a four-year period. And this is what led the SDI to ask for it to be spread out, for companies that request it, over a period of two or three additional years.

What would you need urgently today ?

I would already tell you that we stop explaining to ourselves that everything is fine because everything is not fine. So obviously, the idea is not to be in total miserabilism, but when we look at all the surveys that are carried out by all the institutes, by those of the SDI, by those of Rexecode, Altares, et cetera , from a micro point of view, we see that there is real tension at the level of VSEs today in all sectors of activity. The president of the French Building Federation explained again last week that in 2024, there would still be, I believe, around 90,000 jobs which would be threatened because indeed there is a slowdown in consumption on the secondary school businesses. This is what we see here, with our member companies. Otherwise, we are in exactly the same logic and we have a speech somewhere where they explain to us that “it will pass, it will get better, et cetera et cetera”. So it’s the Coué method, but after a while, you also have to take into account the real subjects and try to provide answers. So even if the government does not have the answer to everything, the fact of being a little more, not heard but listened to on these elements, would indeed allow us to be perhaps a little more positive.