A third, a third, a third. For Nicolas Sarkozy, corporate profits should be shared according to a simple rule – and fixed by the State: one third for employees, one third for shareholders and one third should be reinvested in the company. “The account is not there” estimated the former President of the Republic in 2009, in the midst of the subprime crisis, denouncing “the siphoning off of profits by shareholders”. Two years later, the Elysée presented its “premium versus dividend” – the possibility offered to companies paying dividends to pay premiums exempt from contributions – resembling the “employee dividend” now promoted by Emmanuel Macron. With a philosophy recently summarized by the Head of State: “When you suddenly have an increase in dividends for your shareholders, then the company must have a mechanism which is identical for the employees. »
The left removed the Sarkozy premium in 2015, judging her “ ineffective “. Less than ten years later, the idea therefore resurfaced, in almost identical terms. In a context of inflation putting wages under pressure, MEP Pascal Canfin presented Tuesday, November 29 on Franceinfo, two proposals for mechanisms on behalf of the majority party, Renaissance. On the one hand the “employee dividend”, which would force all companies that pay dividends to establish a value-sharing scheme for their employees. And the “super turnout”, which would be paid to the employees of companies carrying out “super dividends” (greater than 20% of the average of the last five years, for companies with more than fifty employees only). These two avenues still need to be examined by the social partners who are currently working on the subject, and could be the subject of a legislative text in early 2023.
The issue of value sharing, symbol of this hexagonal “third way” aspiring to reconcile labor and capital, never really left the French political scene. A project at the heart of social Gaullism, profit-sharing in 1959, then participation, made compulsory in 1967, were implemented by ordinance against the advice of unions and employers. The Head of State saw in it a middle way between a totalitarian communism and a capitalism intrinsically carrying a “massive and perpetual dissatisfaction”he writes in his Memoirs.
“Condemning both of these opposing regimes, I therefore believe that everything commands our civilization to build a new one, which regulates human relations in such a way that each participates directly in the results of the enterprise in which he brings his effortwrites General de Gaulle. Isn’t this the transposition on the economic level, taking into account the data which are specific to it, of what are in the political order the rights and the duties of the citizen? »
You have 50.38% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.