Unemployment insurance, which the government wants to reform this year, is not the most urgent thing to do, said Medef President Patrick Martin on Thursday on board the plane which took him to Canada with Gabriel Attal. “Yes, we need to go further on unemployment insurance, but I don’t know if this reform has a degree of urgency. The most urgent reform is economic dynamics,” declared the first French employers’ leader. .
Unions destabilized by the relaunch of an unemployment insurance reform
After the failure of negotiations on the employment of seniors, the Minister of Labor Catherine Vautrin announced Wednesday that the government could regain control of unemployment insurance through a decree of default, if the social partners do not complete by now Monday the convention that they negotiated in the fall with an amendment on compensation for older unemployed workers. Gabriel Attal also announced in March a new reform of unemployment insurance starting this year, which should tighten the conditions of compensation for job seekers.
“Government expressions disrupted the negotiations and created tensions, particularly regarding the seniors’ regime,” according to Patrick Martin. He explained that “the unions were destabilized” because during the negotiations, “the State was relaunching a reform of unemployment insurance.” “We can talk about failure. We wanted an agreement,” regretted the president of Medef. “Anything that disrupts the negotiations weighs on the social climate of businesses.”
“We discover each other” with Gabriel Attal
He pointed out the fact that the orientation document which framed the negotiations on the employment of seniors was very restrictive: “We could not spend anything”. The talks stumbled on the creation of an enforceable right to progressive retirement, he said: “It would have cost 300 million euros.”
Patrick Martin estimated that there is at Gabriel Attal “a sincere attention to the social partners, but he does not have the practice that Elisabeth Borne or Jean Castex could have had due to their previous positions”. “But I don’t perceive any negative thoughtfulness. We discover each other,” he added.