Unemployment insurance compensation rules will be tightened from December 1 “ to move towards full employment ” And ” value work even more », confirmed Gabriel Attal in an interview published this Sunday in the French newspaper La Tribune Sunday.
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The duration of compensation will be reduced to 15 months “ under current conditions “, that is to say if the unemployment rate remains below 9%, for unemployed people under 57 years old. It will be necessary to have worked eight months over the last twenty months to be compensated, compared to six months over the last 24 months currently, specified the head of government during the This interview.
Gabriel Attal specified that the government would issue a decree on July 1 so that the reform “ may come into force on December 1 “. Changing the compensation rules requires updating the information systems of France Travail (formerly Pôle Emploi) which cannot be done overnight.
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A “senior employment bonus”
The Prime Minister also confirmed the creation of a “senior employment bonus”. Thanks to this measure, “ an unemployed senior who returns to a job that is less well paid than their previous job will be able to combine their new salary with their unemployment benefit ” And ” will thus regain his initial remuneration, for one year “, explained Gabriel Attal. The unions had reported that salaries would thus be compensated up to 3,000 euros.
Gabriel Attal also wishes to create a “ senior indexes » and study the creation of a “ Senior permanent contract “.
A bonus-malus system criticized
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 “theopportunity to extend it depending on the evaluation to be carried out “.
“ I charge [la ministre du Travail] 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 displayed his “ support for reform » while saying he is opposed « to a generalization or even a simple extension of the bonus-malus “.
The Prime Minister 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 by how much. The CGT had reported that this duration would be reduced in this case by an additional 15 percentage points, which would bring it down to 12 months.
“ To prepare for the economic rebound of 2025 that the forecasters predict, I hope that the rules will be even more encouraging when growth picks up again and the unemployment rate decreases. », further indicated 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.
According to the Ministry of Labor, the government expects 3.6 billion euros in savings from the reform and projects an increase of 90,000 people in employment.
A reform ” criminal » for the CGT
Tightening the affiliation condition would alone generate 2.8 billion in savings, according to the CGT. “ It’s really an anti-young person measure. », criticizes Denis Gravouil, the negotiator on unemployment insurance for the CGT. For him, the absence of an extension decision on the bonus-malus shows that “ the government is totally aligned with the interests of employers “.
Using the words used according to him by the general secretary of the CGT, 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 that “ 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 CGT negotiator, 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, multiple jobs ” to get out of it.