The thick report that Thibaut Guilluy, High Commissioner for Employment, has just made public details 99 measures to facilitate access to work for all. One of them, the fifth, seemingly innocuous, proposes to “link the request for RSA to registration with France Travail”. Under administrative guise, this idea, already endorsed by Olivier Dussopt, the Minister of Labor, constitutes, on closer inspection, a small statistical bomb, because it could quite simply blow up the unemployment figures.
France has nearly 2 million households benefiting from the active solidarity income (RSA), in which approximately 4 million people live. Unlike the other social minima, the RSA is not reserved for a category of the population: it is open to all unemployed adults over 25 years of age and, as such, constitutes the main instrument in the fight against poverty. Its cost for the community – it is the departments that finance it – amounts to 12 billion euros per year, which makes it the first item of expenditure in terms of social assistance, ahead of the allowance for disabled adults ( AAH).
So much for the masses. In detail, as noted by the Court of Auditors in 2022, this system misses its target: less than 1 out of 2 RSA recipients is registered with Pôle emploi as a category A, B or C jobseeker. , which obliges him to carry out “positive acts of job search” in return for the allowance paid. “It suits everyone, because people who are on the RSA or the AAH without looking for a job do not enter the unemployment statistics, stings Agnès Verdier-Molinié, director of Ifrap, a liberal think tank which dissects public spending. Thibaut Guilluy’s report also gives an eloquent figure: in France, 5.1 million people do not work and need a job. This is much more than the official number of 2, 2 million unemployed people whom the government prides itself on having lowered!” In addition, when they are registered with Pôle Emploi, RSA recipients are not the subject of much closer support than other unemployed people, even though they often have greater personal or social integration difficulties. .
Treasures of pedagogy in the ministry
To no longer make the RSA this “survival allowance” pointed out by the Court of Auditors but an effective springboard towards the return to employment, as the legislator had initially wanted in 2008, Olivier Dussopt therefore wishes that all recipients are registered with France Travail, the public body which is intended to replace Pôle emploi from January 1, 2024. In accounting terms, it is a revolution: more than 1 million people who have so far escaped the radar will come increase the administrative registers of job seekers. And if these newcomers are now required to carry out active research, they then risk being counted as unemployed by the Insee survey which determines the famous unemployment rate within the meaning of the International Labor Office (ILO). A figure (7.2% at the last score) extensively commented on each quarter by the government and the media.
At the Ministry of Labor, we are already preparing to deploy treasures of pedagogy to explain that “real” unemployment will not start rising again and that this is only an optical effect. A special category, accounting for the share of RSA recipients who are not, objectively, able to apply for a job, could even see the light of day, just to fix the picture. But by complicating the categories in this way, the government would give food for thought to those who denounce the “halo around unemployment” where hundreds of thousands of people who want to work are not considered unemployed according to ILO criteria. Not easy…
Another puzzle: since February 1st and the reform of unemployment insurance, the duration of compensation for job seekers varies according to the situation of the labor market. This duration decreases if the unemployment rate as defined by the ILO is less than 9%. It increases if it exceeds this rate. What will be the standard meter tomorrow if the “truth” operation concerning the RSA comes to upset the situation? At the beginning of 2024, the negotiation between the social partners is supposed to give birth to new rules on the modulation of allowances. There is no doubt that this threshold affair, criticized in its time by the trade unions, will come back, like a boomerang, in the discussions.