How to better pay workers? For Emmanuel Macron, one of the solutions is to encourage “negotiations in certain branches so that the salary dynamic is there”. During his press conference on January 16, the president deplored the existence of professional branches which “continue to pay below the minimum wage”. In reality, it is illegal to pay an employee an amount lower than that of the minimum wage (interprofessional minimum wage for growth), which has increased by 212.34 euros gross in three years to take into account inflation and now stands at 1,766.92 euros gross monthly for 35 hours of work per week.
This revaluation actually leads to an increase in the remuneration received by workers paid the minimum wage, who represented 17% of employees in 1er January 2023, compared to 12% three years ago). But as the mechanism for indexing salaries to inflation was abandoned in 1983, many employees, even experienced ones, who were paid a little more than the minimum wage, saw their base salary stagnate and be “caught up” by the level of the minimum wage. This situation results from the non-revaluation of the salary scales provided for by collective agreements, these agreements established by unions and employer organizations operating in the same sector.
To shed light on this mechanism, we took the fictitious example of Hélène, employed as a receptionist. She visits trade shows in Ile-de-France and can be sent to a company to welcome customers in English and French. To set his base salary (which may differ from his gross salary, because it does not include a certain number of benefits and bonuses), his employer relied on his collective agreement, that of service providers in the tertiary sector. When she joined the company, in 2020, she was hired at a level on the grid, coefficient 160, which allowed her to earn 28 euros gross more than the minimum wage. Over the months, this conventional minimum wage is exceeded several times by automatic increases in the minimum wage.
The graph below details the “race” between the increases in its sector and the minimum wage.
The service provider sector is not an exception: since 2020, the minimums of many collective agreements have been overtaken by increases in the minimum wage. So much so that the pace of negotiations has accelerated: “The duration between two agreements was just over five quarters between 2014 and 2021; this duration was only two to three quarters in 2022 and 2023”can we read in the latest report from the group of experts on the minimum wagepublished at the end of 2023.
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