Professionals will have the “option” to check an identity document, but not the obligation. Industry representatives expect this recourse to be marginal.
The news relieved restaurateurs, in the gloomy context of the start of the school year. The bill replacing the health pass with a vaccination pass, voted definitively by the National Assembly this weekend, no longer provides for the obligation to control an identity document in addition to the vaccination pass. Indeed, this provision was removed from the text by the Senate, then reinstated in a very softened version by the National Assembly. From now on, restaurateurs and café owners will be able to check an identity document, but only “when there are serious reasons to believe that the document presented is not related to the person who presents it“.
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Faculty, but not obligation. “We will check, for example, if there is an obvious difference between the age of the person indicated by his health pass and the age that he seems to be“, explains Hervé Dijols, president of the SNRTC, employers’ union. This type of control should, according to representatives of the sector, remain quite marginal. “The identity check will not be applied because, firstly, it is not mandatory, and secondly, we are not trained to judge the validity of this pass“, thus swept Jean Terlon, vice-president of the UMIH-catering, this Monday on franceinfo.
The proposal even makes Samuel Yim, federal secretary of the services branch of the CFDT, smile. “Already, in one out of two restaurants where I am currently going, the health pass is not checked. In the bars, it’s the same thing“, he argues.
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New aid envisaged
This relative strengthening of control measures is nevertheless a lifeline for a sector, which fears new closures more than anything else. The end of 2021 has indeed experienced the hotel-café-restaurant (HCR) sector since the wave of the Omicron variant has caused a series of cancellations of meals and end-of-year events. The beginning of the year 2022 is hardly more cheerful: the activity is once again pulled down by the obligation of teleworking which is imposed on some of the employees.
The professionals have therefore decided to back down. “The vaccination pass is all we have to avoid closure or new restrictions“, argues Didier Chenet, president of the GNI, at the end of a meeting with Bercy. The Ministry of the Economy put on the table this Monday a possible extension of the financial aid already offered to the profession to deal with fluctuations in activity.
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Currently, establishments under health restrictions can benefit from partial unemployment coverage without additional charges if they lose more than 65% of their turnover, and from coverage of fixed costs. if their turnover has decreased by 50%. The professional organizations representing the profession want this threshold to be reduced to 30%, they said in a press release on Monday, after their meeting with Bruno Le Maire. “If this new measure were to be put in place, representatives of the sector have indicated to Bercy their wish to increase payroll coverage to 20%, at least for the months of December 2021 and January 2022.“, they added. The unions expect validation of these measures by Matignon within 48 hours.