Lhe sensational speech by Fabien Roussel opposing, during the Fête de Humanity, “the labor left” at “the left of allowances” created an intense controversy. Inspired by the conservative rhetoric of criticism of “cancer of the assistantship” (Laurent Wauquiez) or the symmetrical and inverse valuation of “the France that gets up early” (Nicolas Sarkozy), these declarations are intended to morally rearm the working and threatened popular classes. However, they have the fault of being based on a false idea: contrary to what the communist leader asserts, there is no longer a clear separation between the world of work and that of social benefits.
By opposing “the labor left” at “the left of allowances [et] social minima”, Fabien Roussel hides a major phenomenon: the growing porosity between the world of work and that of assistance. Masked by the deliberately divisive and binary positions of political discourse, this reality is today one of the salient features of our social organization.
Since the early 2000s, the dichotomy between what comes under assistance and what comes under work support – particularly precarious and poorly paid work – no longer holds. With the creation of the employment bonus in 2001, the State took note of the fact that many workers and especially low-income women workers could no longer make ends meet despite the salaries paid to them by their private employers. or public: they had difficulty paying what is now called their constrained expenses – housing or the electricity bill, for example.
Deep dynamics
To overcome this difficulty, one of the guidelines of French social policy consisted in supporting the income of low-income workers – which resulted in intertwining the world of work and that of allowances. By making social benefits a salary supplement for employees paid up to one and a half minimum wage, this policy has gradually erased the boundary between what is salaried work and what comes under social benefits. Created in 2008, the active solidarity income (RSA), which perpetuated the possibilities of combining income from activity and solidarity, and which extended them to very part-time jobs, reinforced this phenomenon.
By providing additional income to low-income employees, the activity bonus introduced eight years later, in 2016, also contributed to nurturing this rapprochement between the world of work and that of assistance. While it has made it possible to support people in difficulty, it has, by concentrating the redistribution effort on the less poor of the poor, institutionalized a growing permeability between the world of employees and that of benefit recipients.
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