“It’s scandalous”, reacts Sandrine Rousseau, deputy for Europe Ecology-The Greens (EELV), Wednesday August 3 on France Inter, concerning the amendment voted by the Senate on the back-to-school bonus. This provision aims to replace the “exceptional back-to-school aid” of 100 euros reserved for French people benefiting from social minima by an exceptional increase of 150 euros for the only beneficiaries of the activity bonus, who therefore have a professional activity.
“The Republicans have embarked on a kind of poverty-hunting that is unworthy”, warns Sandrine Rousseau, rejecting the argument that the right would defend the revaluation of purchasing power through work. According to her, it is above all a way “to make savings on the backs of the poor” all in “giving them moral lessons on how they should behave”.
“This means, in the background, that people who have RSA would not want to work when most of them are in this situation”, she adds. The Green MP denounces “right idea”, “the liberal idea”according to which the beneficiaries of the RSA “would be lazy people”while, according to her, “It’s very different from reality”. “It’s scandalous”repeats the chosen one, pointing to certain speeches “paternalistic and infantilizing” vis-à-vis the poorest people and the “social contempt” of the majority and the right-wing opposition.
With this bill said for purchasing power, Sandrine Rousseau fears “that the poor are even poorer”. “We have bonuses but these are bonuses which only concern, at best, 10% of employees”notes MP EELV, qualifying “of crumbs” the content of the text. According to her, “we are well below what it would take to increase purchasing power”. “There is a serious, criminal denial, in the majority, which is to imagine that the situation will return to what it was before, it is not transitory, inflation on raw materials will settle”concludes Sandrine Rousseau.