“Move towards full employment” and “value work even more”. These are the ambitions of the tightening of unemployment insurance compensation rules, which will be effective from December 1, confirmed Gabriel Attal in an interview published this Sunday May 26 in La Tribune Sunday.
The duration of compensation will be reduced to fifteen months “under current conditions” – if the unemployment rate remains below 9%, for unemployed people under 57 years old. And you will have to have worked eight months over the last twenty months to be compensated, compared to six months over the last twenty-four months currently, specified the head of government.
Elements which confirm the ideas given this week to the social partners by the Minister of Labor, Catherine Vautrin. Gabriel Attal specified that the government would issue a decree on July 1 so that the reform “could come into force on December 1.”
“Senior job bonus”
The Prime Minister also confirmed the creation of a “senior employment bonus”. This measure should allow “an unemployed senior who will return to a job that is less well paid than their previous job” to “cumulate their new salary with their unemployment benefit” and thus regain “their initial remuneration, for one year”, explained Gabriel Attal. The unions had reported that salaries would thus be compensated up to 3,000 euros. He also wanted to create a “senior index” and study the creation of a “senior permanent contract”.
The bonus malus system on short contracts, criticized by employers and today limited to seven sectors of activity, will be the subject of an examination on “the advisability of extending it according to the evaluation at to drive”. “I am instructing Catherine Vautrin to lead a consultation to identify the sectors which will be intended to enter this system and at what pace,” detailed the head of government.
Received by the Minister of Labor this week, the president of Medef, Patrick Martin, showed his “support for reform” while saying he was opposed to “a generalization or even a simple extension of the bonus malus”.
“Criminal” reform for the CGT
The Prime Minister also confirmed the addition of a new threshold to reduce the duration of compensation, already reduced by 25% since February 2023, even more if the unemployment rate falls below 6.5%. He did not specify how much. The CGT had reported that this duration would be reduced in this case by an additional 15 percentage points, or 40%, bringing it down to twelve months.
“To prepare for the economic rebound of 2025 that the forecasters are announcing to us, I hope that the rules will be even more incentive when growth picks up again and the unemployment rate decreases,” said Gabriel Attal.
For the Prime Minister, “it is not a reform of the economy, but of prosperity and activity”. “The gain will be measured by a greater number of French people who will work. And therefore more funding for our system,” he assured.
“Anti-youth measure”
According to the Ministry of Labor, the government expects 3.6 billion euros in savings from the reform and projects an increase “by 90,000 in the number of people in employment”. Tightening the affiliation condition would alone generate 2.8 billion in savings, according to the CGT.
“It’s really an anti-young person measure,” reacted Denis Gravouil, the negotiator on unemployment insurance at the Montreuil central office, for whom the absence of a decision to extend the penalty bonus shows that “the government is totally aligned with the interests of employers.
Using the words used according to him by Sophie Binet before Catherine Vautrin, he judged that the reform was “criminal”, citing studies on the health of the unemployed and those around them which show “the suicide rate of unemployed people at the end of their rights is twice as high as in the employed population.
“The objective is not the incentive, the return to employment, since there is no link with the fact of reducing rights to this point”, estimated for his part Olivier Guivarch of the CFDT.
For the negotiator of the first union, this “confirms that the objective was financial”. In government “they start from a sum that they must find and they look at what measures can produce this reduction in spending fairly quickly” at the risk of “forcing certain people to take poor quality jobs, short contracts , to have multiple jobs” to get by.