Lhe Minister of Labor, Catherine Vautrin, announced, on May 17, the main lines proposed by the executive to once again reform unemployment insurance, thus regaining control of the union and employer organizations.
The objective set for the evolution of the rules is to achieve full employment. The link thus made between reform of compensation rights and full employment is based on two hypotheses. First, unemployment compensation rules would have a major effect on the behavior of job seekers in terms of resuming professional activity. Second, an acceleration of the return to work of the unemployed would have a major effect on the volume of jobs available.
Although they may seem plausible, these two hypotheses are in reality not obvious: job search and hiring behavior have many other determinants than unemployment compensation rules (needs of the economy , training, personal situations).
Likewise, an acceleration in the return to employment can certainly result in a reduction in unemployment, but this may be short-lived due to a change in the conditions of labor rotation (longer contracts). short, less good adaptation between the missions of the position and the skills of the employees, more frequent back and forth between employment and unemployment). Between different possible mechanisms with potentially contradictory effects, only a precise analysis of the labor market can make it possible to decide.
Incompressible deadline
However, the French labor market has just undergone major reforms, the effects of which on employment have not yet been assessed. The effects on the level of compensation are certainly known (decrease in the number of compensation recipients and the average compensation); there are some indications of sectoral changes (notably in the case of seasonal workers). But the overall effects are still to be determined.
However, evaluations of the 2019-2021 reform are precisely underway. Commissioned by the Ministry of Labor, they are carried out by teams of independent researchers, under the control of a scientific committee responsible for certifying their quality. The characteristics of unemployment insurance explain an incompressible delay of several months for the data to be available before it can be analyzed. The publication of the first results is planned for the end of 2024.
The need to carry out evaluations was presented as a central element during the discussion of the law on unemployment insurance. Of course, public policy has its own autonomy and does not always require prior scientific validation, but reasoned public action, just like democratic debate, cannot be satisfied with a successive accumulation of reforms in a very short time, without even take the time to learn lessons from previous reforms.
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