The LR led by Laurent Wauquiez want to place work at the heart of Michel Barnier’s government action. They are right philosophically, politically and economically. Philosophically because, in societies shaped, first by Christianity, then by the Enlightenment and then by the Republic, work is the backbone of the social order. The more these societies are shaken by war, technology, terrorism, various crises, the more it is necessary to strengthen this backbone.
Politically, because opinion polls show that an immense majority of our fellow citizens like their work and even their company. They do not like their manager and find themselves underpaid, but these legitimate demands do not mean that it is work itself that is the subject of general distrust.
Economically, finally, because, as Marx showed in his luminous pages, all value ultimately emanates from human work. Consequently, the enrichment of a society comes from the number of people who work, their working hours, their motivation and their efficiency.
The pitfall of universal income
Robin Rivaton has chronicled in these pages the results of a major study financed by Sam Altman on universal income, a fad of degrowth ecologists for whom work is heresy, and of Californian technophiles for whom artificial intelligence will make human work disappear. This study, carried out according to rigorous scientific criteria, shows that beneficiaries of universal income reduce their participation in the labor market and, for those who continue to work, their working time, to the benefit of their leisure time. Recipients of universal income see their stress level decrease in the very short term but then increase again. Ultimately, their consumption of alcohol and painkillers increases. In short, as philosophical reasoning suggested, universal income, in that it “disincentivizes” work, is an individual and collective catastrophe. When politics incentivizes work, it provides an immense service to individuals and society.
A good economic program must therefore encourage our fellow citizens to work more, which can take two forms. First, we must allow people to take on more responsibilities and earn higher salaries. This issue is at the heart of the Bozio-Wasmer mission launched by Eisabeth Borne when she was Prime Minister. The problem is well identified: to combat unemployment, since the 1990s, successive governments have implemented reductions in charges, which can go up to 3.5 times the minimum wage but are concentrated between 1 and 1.6 times the minimum wage.
This strong degression does not encourage companies to increase salaries, but it also does not encourage employees to want to take on responsibilities, because the effect of additional charges combined with the progressiveness of income tax considerably reduces the financial gain reported to the increase in gross salary. Denis Ferrand, at the Rexecode institute, calculated that for an employee living alone whose salary would increase from 1.4 to 1.5 times the minimum wage, only 27% of the gross increase obtained would be retained after income tax, due to the reduction in the activity bonus. This is obviously very low and not at all motivating.
“The unemployment trap”
Then, it remains necessary to fight against “inactivity traps”, that is to say these situations in which work does not offer significant financial gains compared to inactivity. Economists call this phenomenon “the unemployment trap”. Eurostat calculates it for European countries as the share of gross remuneration “absorbed”, for those who return to a job paid at two thirds of the average salary, by the loss of unemployment benefits and the increase in taxation. This “absorbed” remuneration is of the order of 70% in France. Even if this figure has tended to fall over the last twenty years thanks to the introduction of the activity bonus, it remains too high.
What can be done to remedy these dysfunctions? Smoothing out the reductions in charges, simplifying our social assistance system, building housing and ensuring that work systematically pays significantly more than inactivity: this is a good start to revaluing work in our country.
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