OIt is difficult to understand the merits of a new reform of unemployment insurance aimed at toughening the conditions of compensation for the unemployed, a doctrine of which this double presidential mandate will have made a specialty. The motivations to justify these blows to Unédic have varied over time.
This was the financial argument for resolving the debt: if it was a question of reducing its weight, it would have been useful for the State to set an example by repaying to the joint institution what it owed it. must: the financing of partial unemployment during the health crisis and the equivalent of social contributions lost due to the policy of reducing social charges conducted for years by this government and those that preceded it.
Compensate, place, train
The other argument put forward consists of justifying this reform in the name of work with the implicit postulate that unemployment benefits, their amount, their duration are the enemies of employment and policies to put the unemployed back into work, the famous so-called policies “active”.
And it is on this point of the argument that the shoe pinches, and for several reasons. Because since the creation of the first forms of compensation for the unemployed with the creation of Unédic in 1958, then that of the National Employment Agency (ANPE) in 1967 (today France Travail), compensation of the unemployed and their placement on the labor market were one and the same pair.
This was the whole meaning of the establishment of a public employment service in those years, everything that the Ortoli report, written by a certain Jacques Delors (1925-2023), called for in 1963. : implement a major public employment infrastructure policy to support the professional mobility of workers. To do this, it was first necessary to correctly compensate the unemployed (Unédic), support them in placing them (ANPE) with possible recourse to vocational training (Association for Professional Training of Adults). Compensation, at the heart of reforms today, constituted the essential link and the main lever of these active policies.
More recently, an inspector from the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (IGAS), Jean-Marc Boulanger, appointed by the government in 2008 of a prefiguring mission for the creation of Pôle emploi, presented compensation for the unemployed as remuneration for the job search work of the unemployed. He recalled, what the current government seems to ignore, that “compensation and placement via an active intermediation policy constituted the two levers to be put in the same hand to give substance to the desire to give all its power to the career security strategy in a flexible job market and dynamic ».
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