Office notebook. “There are more and more employees who are asking for salary advances and small businesses who would like to practice split payment”, says Amaury Lelong, CEO of PayFit. This young company specializing in HR solutions for VSEs / SMEs publishes, Thursday, June 8, a study carried out in May by Ipsos on the French and their pay. Its results reveal in particular that the idea of being paid when you want is gaining ground, especially among young employees.
In the Ipsos/Payfit study, nearly one in four people (23%) requested a salary advance in 2023 and more than one in three (36%) for the youngest (18-34 years old). In another study carried out in February 2022 by OpinionWay for the fintech Rosaly, they were half as many: only 11% had done so, but 33% of employees said they already wanted to use it.
Inflation at more than 5% is still at the heart of employees’ concerns, but is not the only explanation for this emerging trend. In 2022, employees who asked for advances mentioned their concern about not being able to meet an invoice. The reasons given in 2023 go beyond this: it is a question of no longer waiting for the end of the month to receive one’s due. Nearly one in ten employees would like it to be possible to collect their pay whenever they want.
Contrary to the labor code
At a time when working time is split up, four hours here, three hours there, including Saturday and Sunday, and when the work itself organized in multiactivity, even multitasking, concerns more and more assets, pay-as-you-go may seem coherent, even attractive. Thus, 21% of people questioned by Ipsos for Payfit expect it “better financial management”.
Flexibility in the payment of remuneration to the Anglo-Saxon, as practiced in England or Australia, whether desirable or not, is gaining ground. But this is not at all what the labor code provides, which is very clear on the subject: “Payment of remuneration is made once a month”, indicates article L. 3242-1. And the salary advance itself is framed: “A deposit corresponding, for a fortnight, to half of the monthly remuneration, is paid to the employee who requests it”, continues the same section of the code.
The law voluntarily enshrines the employment relationship between employer and worker over the long term, to protect the employee. A whole part of life in society is also organized on the same monthly tempo: rent, loan repayments, etc. On the business side, employers are already dreading the administrative complexity that would accompany a hypothetical à la carte payroll payment. However, the labor code already makes exceptions for seasonal workers, intermittent workers, temporary workers, because their way of working is fragmented. Is split pay inevitable?