Since his arrival at Matignon, he has never hidden it: Gabriel Attal wants to tighten the rules of unemployment insurance by another notch, a recurring theme of the executive since 2019. If the project was indeed in the government pipeline , the budgetary blow received at the start of the week with the official publication of the public deficit figure for 2023 at 5.5% – instead of the 4.9% anticipated by Bercy – has obviously accelerated things.
Guest of TF1’s 20 Heures, Wednesday March 27, the Prime Minister announced that a new reform of unemployment insurance would take place “this year”. The contours are not yet drawn precisely. Gabriel Attal thus mentioned his desire to reduce the duration of compensation “by several months but not below 12 months”, compared to 18 months currently. It is also considering the possibility of affecting the amount of unemployment benefit and its degression.
The Unédic funds in the viewfinder
A serious turn of the screw is coming, in the name of encouraging a return to work. However, these are two objectives that are both distinct and linked which collide: that of full employment, on the one hand, targeted for 2027 and that of a public deficit of 3% – the sacrosanct rule of the Maastricht Treaty soon to be relaxed -, set for the same deadline. This new reform, the third in the space of five years, is above all intended enable the State to reduce its budgetary burden. According to the Court of Auditors, it will be necessary to find 60 billion euros by the end of 2027 to get into the loop of Brussels. The slope is steep and the time limit is short. However, beware of rushing. “We implemented two reforms in 2019 and 2023 and we are going to develop another before even having evaluated the effects of the previous ones,” laments Christian de Boissieu, professor emeritus at Paris-I University and vice-president of the Circle of Economists.
Without knowing the whole story, it is difficult for the moment to precisely quantify the savings that could be made. In any case, the State will draw from Unédic’s coffers – surplus of 3.6 billion euros, after 4.3 billion euros in 2022. It has already taken 2 billion in 2023 and account in take 10 billion more by 2026. Unemployment insurance, although largely taken over by the State in recent years, is managed in an equal manner by Unédic, itself managed by the social partners. “When you are in this order of magnitude, you can go there and above all you do not need arguments, the budgetary objective being disguised with a biased and partial reading of the economic literature, which in no way demonstrates the recovery of employment of people whose duration of compensation is reduced. This is indeed an authoritative argument”, assures the economist Bruno Coquet.
Job quality, a blind spot?
And by tightening the rules a little more, the government is in no way solving the problem of job quality. “The idea is to ensure that inactivity pays less than work and not to make the latter more attractive, but people are already unable to live off their salary when they work full time,” regrets the labor market specialist. For Daniel Labaronne, Renaissance MP and economist, “we must both be a little less generous with unemployment insurance and reduce the gap between net salary and gross salary, by reducing contributions.”
In any case, Gabriel Attal’s offensive does not seem risky from a social point of view. Unlike pension reform, “this doesn’t put anyone on the street”, maintains Bruno Coquet. If social discontent does not take shape and billions in savings flow in, the government will have ticked all the boxes.
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