questions in the majority after Gabriel Attal’s announcements on unemployment insurance reform

By putting back on the table a reduction in the duration of compensation for the unemployed, the Prime Minister provoked a reaction from the social partners, the political oppositions… and in his own camp.

Go so quickly, and so hard: the method first asks questions. By proposing a further tightening of unemployment insurance conditions, Gabriel Attal is embarking on his first structural reform to find savings in a degraded budgetary context, at the risk of fueling social protest before the European elections. Reducing the duration of compensation or its level, increasing the time worked to be covered, the Prime Minister showed the color on Wednesday March 27, eager to make the “social model“French plus”incentive” to work.

Three avenues for reforming unemployment insurance and the social partners will initially be required to negotiate. Even if the unions are already saying it: they do not want this reform. And even in Emmanuel Macron’s camp, some are wondering about this future reform.

“If it’s about saving money, you might as well say so”

“Such pressure on the unions is extremely brutal“, confides a Renaissance elected official. But what questions the most is the philosophy: Emmanuel Macron, himself, had praised a new approach for unemployment insurance with a modular system. Unemployment is falling, conditions are getting tougher, unemployment is increasing, conditions are becoming more flexible, as presented in the 2022 reform.

“We cannot say that at the moment things are going well, which would justify a turn of the screw“, estimates a majority executive, while unemployment stagnates. And adds: “If it’s about saving money, you might as well say so.“The fact remains that once the negotiations are concluded or not between the social partners, the parliamentarians risk not having their say, nor having to count themselves. As the law allows it, the government will be able to pass its reform, by decree.