Grandstand. There is no doubt that it is better to draw the bulk of one’s income from one’s work than from an allowance, that it is healthy to consider that social rights have duties as their counterpart and that a society which leaves a large fraction of its members outside the world of work is failing. There is also no doubt that if you ask an employee who earns the minimum wage if he finds it normal that his neighbor can receive half of it without working, he will answer you no. And this question becomes all the more sensitive when there are difficulties recruiting in certain sectors, including for low-skilled jobs. However, the obligation of activity for recipients of active solidarity income (RSA) poses more problems than it solves.
Shortly after the creation of civic service, several politicians had asked for it to become compulsory. However, at the time, there were more young volunteers than missions proposed and financed. It was paradoxical to want to force young people to do civic service to which they were denied access! If there had to be an obligation, it was for the public authorities to offer a mission to each young volunteer rather than the other way around. But that required putting the means and the will into it.
The question of the obligation of activity for the recipients of the RSA is a little of the same water. It is easier to target benefit recipients than to recognize that the public authorities have not met their own obligations and that they are not applying those already set.
Six months before a first interview
When the active solidarity income was created, I registered, in the law of 1er December 2008, that benefit recipients should be subject to the same obligations as other job seekers, with the possibility of reducing or eliminating the benefit in the event of refusal of two valid job offers, together with the obligation for Pôle emploi register RSA recipients. This obligation, consistent with a logic of rights and duties, aroused an outcry from some of my government colleagues, starting with Laurent Wauquiez, then Secretary of State for Employment. He told me that given the criterion of the drop in the number of unemployed, measured by registrations at Pôle Emploi, he was not going to shoot himself in the foot by letting people register there. who were less likely than others to enter the labor market. The same, some time later, denounced the “cancer of the assistantship”.
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