HASfter Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term, marked by labor market reforms, a reduction in unemployment benefits, then the abandonment of a first pension reform, the social agenda for the second term is becoming clearer. It includes four main reforms: a further reduction in unemployment insurance (by reducing the rights according to the economic situation), a shortening of retirement (by playing on the age or the duration of contributions), the conditionalization of activity of the RSA (possibly merged with the other social minima) and the reform of the public employment service, renamed France travail (responsible for supporting, controlling and sanctioning people looking for work).
Together, these four reforms outline a further stage in the transformation of the French model of social protection; it is a question of organizing on the one hand its reduction, on the other hand of turning its back on its original philosophy (resulting in particular from the National Council of the Resistance), to produce a version more compatible with the expectations of the market.
First, there is a reduction in the socialized share of protection expenditure in the economy. The government makes no secret of it, it no longer aims simply to control the rise in social expenditure, but to reduce it structurally and for the first time since 1945. This is already reflected in an unprecedented reduction in the share of unemployed people receiving unemployment insurance, share that the new reform would further reduce. In terms of pensions, the line is also clear: the proposed reform would reduce the average length of retirement for people born in the 1970s to that experienced by their grandparents born in the 1930s, i.e. close to three years younger than the generation of their parents born around 1950.
Market regulation
Beyond this structural reduction in expenditure, the reforms envisaged also aim to reorient French social protection in the direction of market regulation of the economy. Indeed, the French system, with its strengths and its limits, was built around the wage earner, of which social insurance remains a central institution, which provides salaried persons, beyond just remuneration, with legal protection (the labor law) and specific social insurance rights. The economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) clearly showed that through this protection, which he was the first, in 1944, to describe as ” social protection “the company aimed to protect itself against shocks specific to the operation of the market.
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