The government will present a bill before the summer to simplify life for businesses. We do not yet know the content of the text, but a parliamentary report, welcomed by the Minister of the Economy, proposes in particular to raise the social thresholds of companies. What is it about ? And what would the impact be?
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To fully understand the subject before the presentation of a bill to simplify life for businesses, particularly on the question of the planned increase in social thresholds, it is necessary to remember that employers have social obligations towards their employees. Details from Sarah Lemoine.
franceinfo: Is it the law that imposes these social obligations on employees?
Sarah Lemoine: What triggers these obligations is the number of employees listed and declared each year. Concretely, when a company grows and hires, it has increasingly important social obligations, once it reaches 11, 50 or 250 employees. These are the three main thresholds.
What does the parliamentary report submitted in February to the Minister of the Economy propose?
He suggests raising these three thresholds by one notch. This means, for example, that companies with at least 50 employees would be exempt from the social obligations imposed on them today. These would be transferred to larger companies, with at least 250 employees.
What would the consequences be?
The big victim would be the works council, which today is called CSE (Social and Economic Committee). It would take quite a hit in companies with 50 to 249 employees. If this proposal were adopted, the CSE would logically lose its operating budget.
Which means more money to finance the social and cultural activities of several million employees, with a loss of purchasing power as a result. No more money to pay for expertise either. Employers would no longer have the obligation to consult staff representatives on the economic and financial situation, strategic direction and working conditions. Nor to transmit company data to them, underlines Caroline Acs, from Tissot editions.
Raising social thresholds would therefore have consequences on the dialogue between employees and employers?
If this idea were included in the bill, it would be the most important reform of social dialogue since the 1946 law, which established works councils in structures with more than 50 employees, some experts tell us. The CSE has a central place today; cutting it in companies with fewer than 250 employees would risk weakening this social dialogue.