VSIn accordance with the announcements of candidate Emmanuel Macron during the presidential campaign in 2022, the three social reforms on the agenda for the second five-year term (unemployment insurance, RSA and pensions) have been launched. The first will probably come into force at the end of 2022, the second will be the subject of an experiment from January 2023, the third is in the consultation phase. But, while they are supposed to modernize and energize employment and the labor market, one can legitimately ask whether these measures, in particular the first two, are not part of an obsolete conception of employment policies.
The unemployment insurance and RSA reforms are both guided by the idea that benefit recipients are, if not fraudsters – administrative sources show that this is a very minority phenomenon –, at least calculators that it would take “incite” to take jobs by reducing the amount and/or duration of their allowances or by demanding compensation from them. This reasoning is unconvincing. Many potential beneficiaries do not claim the benefits to which they are eligible, the number of unemployed people receiving benefits is falling sharply, there are too few vacant jobs to meet all the demands, and recruitment difficulties relate in part to positions whose conditions of work and employment are not of good quality.
Moreover, we now have enough hindsight to see that these policies, fashionable at the turn of the 2000s and implemented by Tony Blair in the United Kingdom or by Gerhard Schröder in Germany, have certainly given spectacular results in in terms of the unemployment rate, but have been accompanied by an increase in poverty (including among seniors) and a sharp deterioration in the quality of employment. In Germany, the Hartz laws, which organized the reduction of unemployment coverage and merged unemployment benefit and assistance allowance to force the long-term unemployed to take low-wage jobs, have had very mixed results. .
Huge mess
Is this really the employment policy that we need and that suits our times? Probably not. Firstly, because it places the weight of French public and private choices – that of relocations and the lack of investment in skills – on employees transformed initially into unemployed people, then into job seekers. welfare and gradually stigmatized or designated as “assisted”. Then, because this misfortune and this injustice, experienced mainly by the working classes, provoke resentment and vote for the extremes. Finally, and above all, because this policy constitutes a gigantic waste of skills, skills which we nevertheless need for the reconstruction of our economy.
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