“We will continue on this path of rigor and responsibility always with a common thread […] that of work”: after the unprecedented slippage in France’s public deficit – 5.5% of GDP in 2023 – the head of government Gabriel Attal intends to make savings on social spending. “The more French people we have working, the more we will have the opportunity to balance our finances,” assured the Prime Minister on the eve of a seminar on work, this Wednesday, March 27.
The meeting, in the style of a Council of Ministers, will focus on encouraging people to return to work, including the contested reforms of the RSA (active solidarity income, editor’s note) and unemployment insurance, and on “de-employment” or low wages, and on new forms of work such as the four-day week, still at the experimental stage.
With 15.8 billion euros more in public deficit than the government had planned, the executive is seeking to make savings on public spending in order to pursue the debt reduction objective reaffirmed by the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire, who rules out raising taxes. It is especially in the 2025 budget that efforts will have to be made, estimated by Bercy at “at least 20 billion” euros.
New unemployment insurance reform
Among the avenues considered by the executive to boost employment and save money is a new reform of unemployment insurance that the unions are contesting, after the controversial ones of 2019 and 2023. Gabriel Attal intends to “reopen” this project, in defending “a social model which encourages more activity”. Bruno Le Maire has been repeating for weeks that the duration of compensation for the unemployed must be reduced, arguing that structural reforms are necessary to achieve full employment.
He pleads for a “definitive” takeover by the State of unemployment insurance, currently managed by the social partners, via Unédic, a joint body. Unions and employers renegotiate the rules every two to three years to take into account changes in the labor market. The leaders of the five major trade union centers called on March 18 to abandon a new reform and to “stop the populist stigmatization of the unemployed”.
A new meeting on “the pact of life at work”, between trade unions and employers’ organizations was also held on Tuesday. These negotiations relate in particular to the employment of seniors, to allow employees to stay in their jobs longer, while the legal retirement age has been raised from 62 to 64 years. According to a majority official, the government is looking for “financial margins” but in terms of work “there are few” while several structural reforms have already been undertaken, from pensions to RSA.
The reduction in the duration of compensation would take at least one year to produce its effects on public accounts, “between the time of negotiation and that of implementation”, according to him. But “the signal is interesting for financial institutions and the markets”, at a time when France’s rating could be downgraded by the major agencies in the coming weeks.
Four day week
The seminar should also focus on the experimentation of the four-day week, which will begin in the ministries in the spring and will last “at least one year”. Announced in January by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, this experiment aims to evaluate “the impact”, particularly “in terms of balance between professional and personal life”, of this modulation of working time which consists of concentrating one’s hours on a reduced number of days.
“It will be carried out at constant staff levels” and without reduction in the legal working time of 1,607 hours per year, insists the General Directorate of Administration and Civil Service (DGAFP) in this note dated Friday. “It will be up to each department head to determine the relevance” of carrying out the experiment or not, she adds. The modulation of working hours will begin “no later than September 2024 for a period of at least one year”, it is specified in the note.
A first assessment will be drawn up in the summer of 2025 and will be used to prepare “the sustainability and/or extension” of the experiment. In addition to the four-day week, administrations will be able to test the four and a half day week or the alternation of weeks of four then five days.
The experiment will be carried out on a “voluntary” basis, but civil servants who have “regulatory service obligations”, such as teachers, or time cycles different from the traditional five-day week, will be excluded. Its “logic” is “to evaluate how the device would allow […] to benefit as many agents as possible”, and in particular those who do not have access to teleworking, “from a reduction in the days worked with on-site presence”.