Unemployment insurance reform: “It is necessary to go further,” says Olivier Dussopt
orange with media services, published on Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at 09:41
“When things are going well, we tighten the rules and when things are going badly, we relax them.” In an interview with Le Parisien, the Minister of Labor evokes the next Canadian-style unemployment insurance reform.
Full employment, i.e. an unemployment rate of around 5% compared to the current 7.3%, by 2027 is “feasible”, assures Olivier Dussopt in an interview with Parisian Tuesday 26th July.
To achieve this, “through reforming the RSA, we will better support those furthest from the labor market.” All of our regulations must be geared towards people returning to work: this requires the reform of unemployment insurance‘ said the Minister of Labour.
“There is an urgency: the rules of the unemployment insurance reform decided in 2019 and implemented in 2021 due to Covid will be extended. They expire on November 1, 2022,” demands the minister. This will be done through a legal text that will be presented at the beginning of the school yeare, which will be first on Parliament’s menu when it returns from the summer recess from early October. The minister explains that the government wants to extend these controversial rules “to keep this reform positive and to think about the next step”.
“It is necessary to go further,” he continues. “Our compensation rules must take into account the state of the labor market, as does Canada, for example. When things are going well we tighten the rules and when things are going badly we relax them.”he explains and takes over an election campaign commitment from Emmanuel Macron.
“We will address this issue with the social partners from the start of the school year,” adds Mr. Dussopt. “Areas can be opened in terms of the duration of compensation and its decreasing nature. These parameters will be discussed during the consultation,” he stresses. With regard to the assessment of the transition to a “good situation” or a “degraded situation”, he judges that this “must be objective”. This will be done “either by criteria such as a number of consecutive quarters of improvement in employment, or by a committee giving us an opinion,” but the methods will not “not be stopped.”
When asked about the change from Pôle emploi to France Travail, the Minister rejected changing the name of the cosmetics and affirmed, without going into detail, that this would lead to “simplification and better coordination between the actors (municipalities, private actors, etc.)”. . .
As for the RSA, which the President wanted to allocate 15 or 20 hours of “effective activity that allows integration”, Dussopt says, on condition that “the new modalities will be put in place as soon as possible”.
Finally, on pensions, he points out that the consultation “will start after the meeting of the National Council for Start-ups in September” to ensure that “summer 2023 is the horizon for the entry into force of the first effects of the reform”.
