This time, Charles Touboul was not pushed to his limits. Thursday, October 14, the director of legal affairs of social ministries again went to the Council of State to defend the government’s position on the reform of unemployment insurance. With two other senior officials, he brought the contradiction to the lawyers of eight unions and four organizations of guide-lecturers who had seized the high court in order to obtain the suspension of a decree of September 29, relating to the compensation for job seekers. An exercise to which he had already engaged, four months previously, in the same enclosure. But Thursday’s debates were much more peaceful for him than in the previous confrontation.
This new audience at the Palais-Royal is the umpteenth rebound in a battle that began two and a half years ago. To save money and contain the inflation of short-term employment contracts, the executive has been seeking, since spring 2019, to transform unemployment insurance. He wants in particular to rewrite the formula for calculating the allowance paid to job seekers, because the one that was in force previously favored, according to him, the multiplication of fixed-term contracts of a few days. The measure he advocates leads to a decrease in the monthly amounts allocated to people alternating odd jobs and inactivity. The system is coupled with a bonus-malus system, the effect of which is to increase the contributions of companies which frequently separate from their employees.
All these mechanisms were included in a decree of March 30, which the central employee organizations attacked, in summary proceedings, before the Council of State. During the hearing, organized on June 10, Mr. Touboul was a little jostled by the magistrate who chaired the session, Anne Egerszegi, the latter saying “A little dubious” faced with some of the explanations provided by the senior official. Twelve days later, the sentence fell: without calling into question the principle of the reform, the summary judge ordered the suspension of the rules for calculating unemployment benefit, because according to her, economic uncertainties prevented entry in force, scheduled for 1er July, provisions that are supposed to promote job stability.
Not at all discouraged, the executive announced at the beginning of the summer that it would quickly come back to the charge so that the incriminated measure could come into play from the 1er October. Hence the decree dated September 29, which the unions also contested, which gave rise to this new hearing at the Palais-Royal on Thursday.
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