The reform of unemployment insurance, which has already partially entered into force, should be further tightened on December 1. But these measures do not fulfill their real objective.
Back to previous episodes: on October 1, the reform partially entered into force. It has the consequence of reducing unemployment benefits, sometimes very significantly. According to the official impact study of Unedic (organization responsible for managing unemployment insurance), the reform could lead to a drop of up to 40%, for people who have a series of short contracts and are therefore often the more fragile. But it is not over: on December 1, the reform will indeed be hardened. It will now be necessary to have worked six months, instead of four, to start receiving any allowance.
The argument of Elisabeth Borne, the Minister of Labor, is that the time has come for such a reform. She was the guest of France Inter on Thursday October 28: “At a time when the recovery is very dynamic, when companies are hiring massively and where even many companies are having difficulty recruiting, now is the time to encourage work. This is the goal of the unemployment insurance reform. “
The main argument is therefore that companies find it difficult to recruit, there are vacant positions, which means that some unemployed people would take advantage of their benefits to take it easy: it is therefore necessary to encourage return at work.
This figure is a magnificent trompe-l’oeil. In there you have all the offers that are either already filled or have been canceled, but have not yet been removed from the database. You also have a constantly changing stock of offers that are posted, and quickly find takers.
It is therefore better to rely on the figures of the Dares, the statistical department of the Ministry of Labor, which spoke this summer of 260,000 unfilled positions. It should be remembered that there are, today, nearly six million people looking for a job in France, including 3.5 million who do not work at all. Even admitting that engineers, traders, bank employees, horticulturalists agree to take a job in construction or catering, that does not solve the problem at all: there will still be millions of them not to find work, because that there is none, while seeing their unemployment benefits drop sharply.
Elisabeth Borne responds to this objection “that there are many vacancies. And the goal is for it to continue, for everyone to be able to find a job. The objective is that all job seekers can benefit from the economic recovery, and that they can find a job.. “
On the goal, everyone will agree. But how to achieve it, when there is a structural lack of millions of offers? Elisabeth Borne never answers this basic question because nothing in this reform allows it to be answered. We are in a pure incantation: the Minister of Labor is content to present reality to us as it would like it to be, but by no means as it is.
Unedic, in its official impact study, predicts that the reform will save more than two billion euros per year at full speed. And this, surprisingly, Elisabeth Borne absolutely never talks about it.
So we can consider that the social protection intended for the most precarious is too generous. We may wish to reduce it. But the minimum in this case is to say it! Politics is not only about deciding: it is also about taking responsibility for its decisions. The government has never done so on this issue.