For Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, it is not a question of “working without being paid”, but rather of training, a driving license or discovering a profession.
The RSA, or the impossible debate around solidarity? The government wishes to condition the active solidarity income to a resumption of activity or training. But evoking the RSA amounts to confronting a part of the right which makes its butter on the cliché of the assistantship and a part of the left which cries out at the stigmatization of precarious people, omitting the limits and threshold effects of this aid. In this debate, the government is in a “at the same time” which still leans rather to the right.
The idea of Macronie is to oblige RSA beneficiaries to perform 15 to 20 hours of activity per week. In the mouth of the Prime Minister, it is not a question “to work without being paid“, but training, a driving license, the discovery of a profession. Supporting the beneficiaries of the RSA so that they find work! Here’s a good idea: as if no one had thought of it …
This accompaniment hardly exists
Is this the case today? The Court of Auditors has not spared itself reports on the subject and anyone who is a little serious on the subject knows that today this support hardly exists. And by evoking “any serious person”we must also include Matignon, where the Prime Minister, herself a former Minister of Labor, is alarmed by these beneficiaries of the RSA who have almost no contact with an adviser.
Somewhat serious people also know that beyond certain abuses, there are above all people who are far from employment, for a third of them, who no longer know which way to get a job: women and men with health, addiction, mobility problems or who have dependent children.
Bringing these people closer to employment requires resources: the RSA represents twelve billion euros per year, financed by the departments. But depending on whether the beneficiary lives in Hauts-de-Seine or Moselle, the community will not have the same means to help him. “The government’s plan is not flexible enough“, confides a department president who slammed the door of a recent experiment on the RSA.
An announcement effect that maintains populist music
The problem is that for the time being, the announcements of the government are not accompanied by any additional budget: it is a matter of an announcement effect, very political, without budgetary reality. The danger is that nothing concrete happens on the RSA: there is no result, and that feeds a little populist music.
In his latest book, François Ruffin reports the words of citizens met in the Somme. French people who denounce the “case so”THE “assisted”, “those who don’t get up in the morning”. Words from National Rally voters who find that the difference between their own salary and the aid received by their neighbor is not so great. To agitate the subject of the RSA without reforming either the operation or the budgets, isn’t this taking the risk of consolidating this type of discourse rather than providing solutions?