The objective has been hammered out since the presidential campaign. Emmanuel Macron wants to achieve full employment by 2027. It is in this quest for an unemployment rate of around 5% of the active population – against 7.1% currently – that the government has already reformed the unemployment insurance and pensions. The third lever it triggers is the reform of the active solidarity income (RSA). This is part of the bill “for full employment” presented, Wednesday, June 7, in the Council of Ministers by the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt.
The text notably concerns the transformation of the public employment service with the creation of France Travail, which will replace Pôle emploi. It provides that all job seekers, whatever their situation, are registered with France Travail, in particular the 2 million beneficiaries of the RSA. However, currently, only 40% of recipients are registered in the files of Pôle emploi. This therefore means that approximately 1.2 million additional people could join the ranks of France Travail. An explosion in the number of job seekers which could have significant political consequences for the government.
Reform “will automatically increase the number of job seekers registered with Pôle Emploi”, recognized Olivier Dussopt, after the presentation of the bill to the Council of Ministers. But this will not affect the unemployment figures published each quarter by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee), those “on which the State has been communicating for at least twenty years” And “which actually have little to do with the number of job seekers registered with Pôle Emploi”said the Minister of Labor.
Different definitions
“The number of registered job seekers should not be confused with the number of unemployed”, for its part, completes the cabinet of the High Commissioner for Employment, Thibault Guilluy, to demine. The unemployment rate is calculated on the basis of a survey carried out using the definition of the International Labor Office (ILO), which allows international comparisons. An unemployed person is a person of working age, aged 15 or over, who has not worked at all – not even an hour – during a reference week, who is available to take up employment within two weeks and who must actively looking for a job in the previous month. A much stricter definition than that used by Pôle emploi for job seekers.
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