more and more employees are leaving their company with a mutual termination agreement

This amicable separation is increasingly requested, sometimes at the initiative of the employee himself.

The number of mutual termination agreements broke records in the first quarter of 2024. This is what emerges from a report by Dares in early July, the statistics department of the Ministry of Labor: 132,468 mutual termination agreements were signed, or 2.3% more than in the last quarter of 2023. This amicable separation is increasingly requested, sometimes at the initiative of the employee himself.

Disagreements with management, workload, low salary: after a year and a half of permanent employment, Louise decided to leave her company, her first job, at the end of February: “I was immediately advised not to resign. I was told: ‘You have to negotiate a mutual termination, it’s important to receive unemployment benefits.’ I realized that I had to confront management and explain to them that I would not leave until I had a mutual termination.” The 25-year-old woman finally obtained her mutual termination agreement approximately 2 months after her request.

Conversely, many employees did not ask for it but the company offered it to them, notes Patricia Drevon, secretary of the Force Ouvrière confederation. The employer thus avoids, in particular, all collective negotiations: “If the company makes conventional terminations beforehand, it has removed employees from the workforce without having to count them as part of a job protection procedure.”

Benoit Serre, vice-president of ANDRH, the national association of human resources directors, responsible in particular for employment, wishes to qualify this observation. “If there are several individual conventional terminations in a row, the administration can reclassify them as disguised contract workers. Nobody plays that game!” he exclaims.

“On the other hand, it is true that employers who see that things are no longer working out with a particular person, rather than firing them or doing unhealthy things, offer them to leave the company with a mutual termination agreement. And that is where the amounts of compensation are a little higher,” specifies the president of ANDRH. “Like any tool, it is sometimes misused”concludes Benoit Serre about the device.

But these figures on the increase in conventional terminations should be put into perspective for Olivier Guivarch, national secretary of the CFDT: “Plus 2.3% seems like a lot, but we are at 132,500 conventional terminations for 238,200 dismissals and we count 478,000 resignations. Which means that the figure for conventional terminations is not at all worrying.” The conventional break remains, all the same, the method of separation between employee and employer which is progressing the most.

Last year, the government tried to reverse the trend by increasing the social security contribution for employers who opted for this formula, hoping to reduce registrations with France Travail.