The Covid-19 crisis has generated a significant liability for untaken paid leave which worries the bosses. To remedy this, the candidate Emmanuel Macron promised the creation of a universal time savings account that the employee could keep even when changing companies.
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Among the promises of candidate Macron during the campaign for the presidential election, there was that of creating a universal time savings account. However, it is precisely at this time that human resources directors are reminding employees that they must take their leave before the end of the legal period. Otherwise they will be lost.
Employees have only one month left, until May 31, to take their days off for the reference period, which began on June 1. In principle, therefore, all days of leave not taken are lost. However, there are exceptions. When, for example, the employee is on sick leave or has had an accident at work, when he is on maternity leave or adoption leave, and also if the employer is unable to take paid leave, for example because of poor work organization. The employer will then have to pay a “compensatory allowance for paid leave”. The employee can finally ask his employer to postpone his untaken leave to the following period, but this is not automatic. As established by the Court of Cassation, the employer must expressly accept this postponement for it to be accepted.
The health crisis has come to shake up all of this. As the magazine’s website reminds us Challenges, there was an accumulation of leave not taken, in particular because of teleworking, which would be the cause of a lower number of deposits of vacation days. Sick leave linked to Covid-19 is also the cause of an accumulation of untaken leave. Some large companies would find themselves with thousands of unused holidays by the end of May. Some business leaders have expressed concern about this situation and around twenty have even chained themselves to the gates of the National Assembly. For them, it is a bomb for their cash flow. This accumulation can be considered as a social debt if the business is sold.
Hence the idea of Emmanuel Macron who, during his campaign, took up the idea of a universal time savings account. We know the time savings account (CET), which allows you to store days off and take them later, or even monetize them if a branch agreement or a collective agreement provides for it. Problem, when you leave the company, the CET does not follow. The idea would be to make this CET portable, from one company to another. And systematically monetizable. Which would allow “work more at certain times of life, and less at others”.