The promise was seductive. In 2013, after long months of intense negotiations, a branch agreement, signed between employers and several unions in the temporary work sector, paved the way for the creation of a new employment contract: the interim CDI (CDII ). “It is very interesting to compare the speeches of the time, in particular those carried by the employers, who spent their time saying that it was about a revolution, that we were going to transform the interim and that a step had been taken”, recalls François Sarfati, university professor at the University of Évry-Paris Saclay and member of the Center for Employment and Labor Studies, author of a study in 2018 on the subject. .
Presented as innovative, this device allows a temporary employment agency to hire a person on a permanent contract, whom it can then delegate to such or such a user company in the same cases as the temporary worker. At the same time, the employee benefits from the advantages specific to the CDI: paid holidays, guaranteed remuneration, job security and access to training between two assignments. The first contracts were signed in 2014. The Hollande government had set a target of 20,000 by 2017. By the end of 2015, 3,000 contracts had been concluded, then 11,000 in 2016, before 20,000 the following year. The target has therefore been reached, but since then the CDII, definitively endorsed by the “Professional Future” law of 2018, has struggled to find its cruising speed.
A sluggish start
“The temporary CDI took a long time to start because companies are very attentive to legal certainty and prefer to engage in devices enshrined in the law”, estimates Isabelle Eynaud-Chevalier, general delegate of Prism’emploi, the organization employer of temporary work. This former head of mission at the Ministry of Labor readily acknowledges this: “When I arrived in the profession five years ago, the temporary CDI was still relatively unknown”. Nearly 10 years after its launch, it is clear that success is still far from guaranteed. On February 1, 2023, there were 54,397 employees working on temporary permanent contracts, after peaking at 58,268 active contracts in May 2022. “Since its legislative inclusion by the Rebsamen law of 2015 on an experimental basis, the temporary permanent contract has , then benefited from a constant and regular progression, of an average of 5.42% per month compared to the workforce of the previous month”, assures the general direction of Labor.
A drop of water in an ocean? CDII employees ultimately represent only 6.8% of the total number of temporary workers in France – 795,900 full-time equivalents at the end of March 2023. For François Sarfati, successive governments have made a mistake by not setting new objectives: ” As long as there is no news around this system or the determination of the public authorities to move it forward, it will not be able to take off. There is a lack of political will to make this contract a real tool for securing career paths. .”
Although reassuring for the beneficiary, the interim CDI also has several biases. “With a permanent contract, the temporary worker is at a financial disadvantage because he loses the end-of-contract bonus. A young person without children, with family security, will prefer classic temporary assignments to benefit from precariousness bonuses. On the other hand, she may also find it advantageous, if she wishes to obtain a loan and housing. This is an ambiguous issue completely absent from the debate”, points out economist Gilbert Cette, professor at Neoma Business School.
With regard to the profile of the beneficiaries, the experts initially feared that the interim CDI was intended only for the most qualified people. This was also the case in the first years, before the situation was reversed. “When the system was launched, temporary employment agencies, in particular the majors who had the capacity in terms of engineering and mobilization of their teams to offer this type of contract, naturally approached their most loyal temporary employees. 2020, we have seen a trend towards a decrease in this prevalence of a strong prior relationship between the agency and the employee: they really turned to people they knew less”, relates Isabelle Eynaud-Chevalier.
The competition of the CDI of employability
However, a ceiling now seems to have been reached. Worse: the number of temporary CDIs has been falling since the start of the year. “We believe that the employability CDI is one of the reasons for this decline. We will be vigilant on its evolution in the coming months”, explains Isabelle Eynaud-Chevalier. This alternative, implemented in 2018, is still in the experimental phase, until December 2023. It is added to the range of contracts available to companies. Its principle differs slightly from its close cousin: the time-sharing work contract for employability purposes is also a permanent contract, but it comes with a professional training capital of 1,000 euros per year. . It is also aimed at people far from employment such as seniors or recipients of social minima, when the CDII is intended for any type of profile.
For some majors in the interim, the employability CDI threatens the success of the CDII. On the other hand, Proman, one of Adecco’s main competitors on the French market, is campaigning for its sustainability. “This is a socially rewarding employment solution that allows people far from employment to benefit from all the advantages of a full-fledged permanent contract and to build a professional project thanks to personalized support”, maintains Roland Gomez, president of the Proman Group.
A market set to evolve further
On the side of Adecco, the results of the interim CDI are rather positive. The market leader in France has signed 60,000 CDIIs since 2014, almost half of the total – 133,000. “We are in a world where the job market is subject to many tensions. Sometimes we invent solutions that do not solve any problem, but here we have something that makes a good match between supply and demand”, advances Alexandre Viros, president of Adecco France. The company highlights in particular the multiple training possibilities compared to traditional temporary work. “We are currently going through a skills and training crisis in France. This makes it possible to obtain experience for the workers concerned, while creating more dynamics for employment”, continues Alexandre Viros.
Difficult for the moment to say how this contract will evolve in the future. “The important angle for increasing the volume of temporary permanent contracts is to better articulate the geographical needs between different user companies. We have to be able to think much more in terms of the ecosystem, which is not always easy and this is not necessarily a question of the will of each other”, analyzes the boss of Adecco France.
Recently, the government removed an important barrier: the Labor Market Law of December 2022 removed the limit on the duration of the mission of an employee on a temporary CDI which was set at 36 months. “With hindsight, we will be able to observe the effects of this measure over time. We were in a curious situation. The big consumers of temporary work such as industry and construction will no doubt seize it”, anticipates Gilbert This. Until now, this constraint slowed down certain companies whose long assignments exceeded three years. “Today, the conditions are met for the temporary CDI to develop in a world of labor shortages, judge Alexandre Viros. It is one of the good solutions, to both attract workers and at the same time give them enough skills to grow in different industries.”