Every Thursday and Friday, Olivia Grégoire slams the padded doors of Bercy to take the pulse of business leaders in the four corners of France. A follower of casual discussions, she has seen rising for several months a deaf anxiety among small bosses: they no longer manage to attract young people. Interview with the Minister Delegate in charge of SMEs, Trade, Crafts and Tourism.
L’Express: What does this request from the younger generation to do “useful” jobs inspire in you?
Olivia Gregory: This is a major challenge for our public policies in the years to come. And not responding to it means running a structural risk for our SMEs. According to a recent Ifop poll, 58% of respondents consider work to be a necessary constraint. This is 9 points more than in 2006. And it goes well beyond 18-24 year olds. Another survey, from OpinionWay, indicates that 68% of under-35s have quit or thought about quitting their job because they didn’t feel useful enough or that it wasn’t meaningful enough. Mirroring this, every time I meet SME or SMI bosses and ask them what’s wrong – the cash flow, the repayment of state-guaranteed loans, the energy bills, etc. – they all answer me. that these questions are complex but situational. Their main concern, and they are unanimous on this, is that they cannot recruit. And that jeopardizes the economic development of their businesses. I would go even further by saying that the labor shortage that we see today is only the tip of the iceberg and the companies that would not have taken the measure of the scale of the work to be carried out to continue to attract and recruit are threatened.
The relationship to work is a meta-subject on which politicians, the media, intellectuals reason with an unsuitable matrix: these glasses of yesterday distort today’s reality. We have been told for decades that you have to study to find a job, with the hope of a permanent contract – the Holy Grail – which will give us job security and the possibility of putting a roof over our heads. . In the Hemicycle, we continue to legislate thinking that freedom is security and property. While the younger generation is positioning itself on a completely different definition of freedom, based on flexibility and use.
How do you explain this dialogue of the deaf?
This is one of the reasons, in any case, why political speech no longer resonates with young people. Take ownership. The next generation doesn’t care. What interests her is being able to access at a given moment what she needs: a partner, with Tinder; a car, with BlaBlaCar. A few traditional companies are beginning to understand this. Decathlon has launched a subscription formula that allows you to change sports equipment as you wish. Leroy Merlin is increasingly inspired by Kiloutou: why buy a drill that you use for ten minutes in your life, say the young people? Unlike their elders, they favor use, not possession, which also makes sense ecologically.
Flexibility, on the other hand, encompasses all considerations around pro-life balance. The labor shortage that we see in the hotel and catering industry does not come from nowhere: young people do not want to work to the detriment of their couple or their family; they want to have the choice to cut whenever they want, even if it means working evenings and weekends from time to time. I heard a kid say a few weeks ago: “I was offered a job at 4,000 euros a month, but I prefer to work for 2,500 euros at four-fifths because on Fridays I can play guitar.” It’s our whole model of contracting, around the CDI and full-time, and our relationship to work that are being turned upside down.
The only value that young people “overweight” compared to us is freedom. They want to go around the world between two jobs, even if it means eating potatoes for months, which their parents never allowed themselves.
It is not a generation of lazy people, as we sometimes hear, that would reject work altogether. She is demanding, because she has seen the misdeeds of metro-work-sleep at her parents’ house. This requirement involves in particular the fact of being able to say to oneself each evening: “What useful thing did I do today?” And, finally, I find that it is rather to their credit.
I also note that there is a return to crafts and arts. For what ? Because young people are coming back to craftsmanship, gesture, in which they find the pleasure of doing. And, even more, to do from A to Z. The more the world becomes virtual, the more the tangible speaks to them. The challenge now, faced with this generational revolution, is for companies to make their own revolution.
Can governments help employers meet this challenge?
The 2019 Pacte law gave them tools to better respond to this quest for meaning. Today there are more than 1,000 companies with a mission in France, which have taken the time to think about and define their usefulness, beyond mere profitability, by involving their employees through the mission committee.
Next, one of the markers of meaning for young people is the environmental and social impact of the company. Remuneration must be increasingly correlated, especially at management level, with this impact. Even if it means then applying this logic to the executives. In the same vein, correlating profit-sharing with this impact could constitute an interesting lever.
Lastly, we must further encourage the sponsorship of skills. The principle is simple: the employee is authorized to be absent for one or two days a month, while remaining paid, to help others and make himself useful. A large number of companies thus allow their employees to free up time for themselves and for others, through tutoring, marauding, charitable commitments… Many SMEs and ETIs could take inspiration from this.
Nearly half of young people say they want to start their own business. This should delight the Minister of SMEs that you are…
This is good news, indeed. To which it is absolutely necessary to provide a political response. Because setting up your box is nice, but it’s a challenge and you’re all alone at the start. We must undoubtedly do better to adjust the status of self-employed workers, improve their social protection, as well as their access to housing. Me, I played the game of going to see a banker when I was independent, and I will never forget his surprise when I asked him what he could offer me to buy an apartment.
The whole spectrum of public action needs to be rethought, because we continue to reason according to a society of employees. We did paternity leave, we are now talking about menstrual leave, in short, we are descending more and more into the intimate life of the employee. And that’s good ! But how to involve the self-employed and the liberal professions?
Does the school have a role to play in introducing people to the business world?
Certainly. But not with the third stage, as it sometimes exists and which is too often, in my eyes, a concentrate of inequalities. It relies too much on the family network: there are those whose parents know the world to find them an interesting internship and the others. Besides, I think it’s not enough to discover the business world. Several progressive immersion sequences would bring a real plus: we are among the best in the world in animation and “gamification”. My idea would then be to get college students to work in class with a video game that would encourage them to think about the fundamentals of business: goods, services, stock, production, import-export, taxes, etc.
The discovery of these fundamentals is a good thing, it would allow each young person to know more trades than is the case today while providing a progressive and more interesting apprehension of the company than the only internship of third.