Clément Viktorovitch returns every week to the debates and political issues. Sunday October 15: the “full employment” bill, voted this week in the National Assembly. And in particular, on one of its most symbolic measures: the reform of the RSA.
It was a promise from candidate Macron in 2022, it has now been voted on: the “Full employment” bill conditions the payment of the RSA, the active solidarity income, on fulfilling 15 hours of activity every week. Paradoxically, the government was initially reluctant to translate this promise into law: the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, only decided to do so under pressure from the Les Républicains group, which had made it a sine qua non condition for support the text.
It is not 15 hours of work that is required, but 15 hours of “activity”. The government relies in particular on a report from the Court of Auditors published in January 2022, according to which the RSA would not lead enough to employment. The figures are indeed alarming: 35% of beneficiaries have been on RSA for more than five years, and 15% for more than ten years. The idea behind the reform would be to bring these people back to employment, by offering them hours of personalized support, training, or immersion in business. Note also that certain RSA beneficiaries, in very specific situations, are exempt.
“Serious social regression”
Better support for RSA beneficiaries, who are often left to their own devices, is what the Court of Auditors recommends. The whole problem comes from the compulsory nature of these 15 hours of activity. Already, on a practical level, there are many recipients who will not be able to pay it: those who take care of a dependent person, are responsible for a large family or simply do not have means of transport. These people risk being sanctioned, without being able to do anything about it.
This is an upheaval that must be taken fully into account. Remember that these hours of activity can be carried out in a company. However, the very principle of the RSA was to encourage a return to work, by allowing the allowance to be combined with a few hours of salary. Not creating free labor. Martin Hirsch, one of the initiators of the RSA, described this on franceinfo as “serious social regression”.
And beyond that, our social protection system is based on a fundamental principle, enshrined in our Constitution: “Any human being who, because of his age, his physical or mental state, his economic situation, finds himself incapacitated to work, has the right to obtain from the community adequate means of existence. As rights defender Claire Hédon points out, it is neither charity nor remuneration. It is a duty of solidarity, which weighs on the Nation, and should be unconditional. We do not leave a human being on our soil without means of subsistence.
“No rights without duties”
This is the beautiful formula used by the government to hide a historic break in our social policy. In 1988, when he created the RMI, the ancestor of the RSA, François Mitterrand wrote: “The important thing is that a means of living, or rather of surviving, is guaranteed to those who have nothing. This is the condition for their social reintegration”. The idea behind the RMI was not to help people in exchange for an activity: it was that helping them is a prerequisite for being able to resume an activity. However, this initial intuition has since been confirmed by the work of Esther Duflo, French economist, Nobel Prize winner in economics, who showed that the more we help the poorest, the more they manage to escape from “poverty traps”. “.
The reason for this reversal is simple: behind it we find the idea that we should fight against welfare. A discourse that has been established for around fifteen years… but is nevertheless woven only of prejudices. According to Esther Duflo, no serious study can validate the hypothesis according to which helping people in difficulty would make them lazy, and encourage them to take advantage of the system.
On the other hand, what we know is that the more we complicate the process imposed to receive aid, the more we increase the non-recourse rate, that is to say the number of people who give up the aid. ask. According to the report from the Court of Auditors, one in three people has already given up applying for RSA. This, in my opinion, is the real tragedy. By conditioning the RSA on hours of activity, this reform does not simply subvert the very meaning that we give to the word solidarity. It has every chance of causing the opposite of the desired effect: plunging even more individuals into greater precariousness.