Emmanuel Macron and his government launch the difficult job of unemployment insurance reform on Wednesday, the first potentially divisive social reform of this five-year term.
The reform aims to respond to the difficulties of recruitment in France by varying the conditions of compensation for the unemployed according to the economic situation, an idea categorically rejected by unions and oppositions.
The bill presented to the Council of Ministers on Wednesday will be debated at the start of the return to parliament in October.
It aims paradoxically initially to be able to extend the current rules of unemployment insurance. Coming from an already controversial reform of Mr. Macron’s first five-year term, they expire on October 31. It is a question of avoiding any legal vacuum for the compensation of approximately 2.5 million job seekers and the application of the “bonus-malus” on the contributions of certain companies which make heavy use of short contracts.
More than the content of the text, it is the sequence it triggers that is debating.
The government will seize the social partners on the question of a modulation of unemployment insurance so that it is, in the words of Emmanuel Macron, “stricter when too many jobs are unfilled, more generous when unemployment is high “.
This will be done “as part of a consultation”, said Wednesday on the media franceinfo Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, adding that in this case, “it’s an exchange, it’s a discussion, it’s proposals, counter-proposals (..) and in the end the government takes the decisions that he must take”.
The executive hammers, like the minister, that there is urgency because it is “unbearable to still be at an unemployment rate of 7.4% and to have at the same time a unanimous return business leaders on recruitment difficulties”.
According to the economist and deputy of the Renaissance presidential party Marc Ferracci, one of the instigators of the 2019 reform, “dozens of studies prove that the rules of unemployment insurance, in particular the duration and the eligibility thresholds, have a effect on the level of employment”.
False, retort the unions for whom the difficulties of recruitment are primarily linked to training and the attractiveness of the professions (salaries, working conditions, mobility, etc.).
The unions have agreed on their opposition to negotiating such a measure.
The president of the French employers’ organization Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, has already judged that “opening a negotiation will be useless since it will not succeed for lack of diagnosis shared with the unions”.
By choosing consultation, the government seems to have already taken into account this lack of appetite on the part of the social partners to negotiate. He wants implementation “before the end of the year” according to Mr. Dussopt.