Lhe series of measures voted by the National Assembly on July 22 within the framework of the law on purchasing power [définitivement adoptée, mercredi 3 août, à l’Assemblée nationale puis au Sénat] conceals, under the rumors of a timely media battle, issues and effects that go beyond the adjustments announced as advances for employees.
These one-off measures (annual bonus, profit-sharing) replace the discussions of employee and employer trade unions on remuneration, which have become useless. Worse, they ignore them, confirming Macron’s denigration of the intermediary bodies of democracy.
The premiums, the amount of which, tripled, can reach up to 6,000 euros per year, do not target low-income households. The unemployed, de facto excluded from the system, are faced with tougher conditions for access to unemployment insurance and reductions in their compensation. As for retirees, the revaluation of pensions does not fix their successive freezes or even inflation.
Hidden work
When the executive threatens to merge by authority the branches in which wages are below the minimum wage, it pretends to ignore that during his previous mandate, Macron reversed the standards, allowing a company agreement, validated by a only organization of employees, even in a minority, prevails over national branch agreements and even over the law.
The criteria for these bonuses endorse the practices of concealed work: payment at the employer’s discretion, exemption from social security contributions and tax exemption. It is, in a way, the legalization of undeclared work practices.
All the social components of the salary, the contributions, the complementary health, the employee savings, are thus reduced or more precisely circumvented. As the Macron ordinances of September 2017 bypassed Parliament to break the labor code, the law on purchasing power excludes wages as the main instrument of the social labor relationship.
Exemptions from contributions – Social security, unemployment insurance, supplementary pension – further impoverish social insurance, already affected by the Pacte law (Action plan for the growth and transformation of companies) of 2019. These exemptions aim to weaken the social protection organizations, it is the “empty box policy” of which the economist Michaël Zemmour speaks (The worldJuly 21, 2022), to justify the need for reform and the use of private insurance of all kinds, complementary health, accident, retirement.
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