Members have been waiting for it for two years. The government has finally submitted to Parliament its report on the non-use of unemployment insurance. A text which was initially to be delivered within two years of the promulgation, in 2018, of the law “for the freedom to choose one’s professional future”. The left-wing parliamentarians had moreover suspected the executive of censoring this report at the start of the year to avoid its publication before the presidential election.
It was therefore at the time when the examination in public session in the National Assembly of the bill paving the way for a new unemployment insurance reform began that the government decided to present the conclusions of the study, which focused on contract terminations that occurred between 1er November 2018 and October 31, 2019. It therefore does not take into account the previous 2019 reform and is based on the eligibility criteria of the 2017 Unédic agreement.
The result is instructive: between 390,000 and 690,000 people eligible for unemployment insurance do not use it. “According to the central hypotheses used in the report, approximately 30% of people aged 25 to 60 who experience the end of their contract in the private sector without being registered beforehand with Pôle Emploi and who meet the eligibility criteria do not resort to unemployment insurance », indicates the report carried out by the Direction of the animation of research, studies and statistics (Dares), attached to the Ministry of Labor. A rate close to that observed for other social benefits: 34% for the active solidarity income and 32% for pensions.
“Not sufficiently informed”
“Depending on the scope and assumptions used, the estimate of the rate of non-use of people not registered with Pôle Emploi in the year following their end of contract varies between 25% and 42%”, specify the authors who also establish the profile of these non-users. Thus, it is mainly employees on short contracts (41% of fixed-term contracts and 36% of temporary workers compared to 16% of permanent contracts) and people who work shorter hours than appellants, with potentially lower rights – “55% of those eligible who have worked between four and six months do not use unemployment insurance, compared to 19% for those who have worked for more than two years”.
“Unsurprisingly, people on short contracts are the most affected, whereas it is these same people who were targeted by the 2019 reform by tightening the rules concerning them”, notes the communist MP for Bouches-du-Rhône Pierre Dharréville, who had taken advantage of the examination by the Social Affairs Committee of the unemployment insurance bill, Wednesday, September 28, to table an amendment, adopted, calling on the government to publish this report within one month.
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