On Wednesday, Gabriel Attal was invited to TF1 to say mass: the country is in debt, the poor and the workers must pay. The Prime Minister found an ideal target, the unemployed. Thus, among other anti-social measures, he announced that he was considering reducing the duration of compensation. The previous unemployment reform of 2022 has already reduced this duration from 24 to 18 months. If he has not announced a precise measure, Attal warns that the cut will be dry: “I don’t think it should go less than 12 months”. In short, Macron’s 2nd term could have reduced the duration of compensation by half!
But Gabriel Attal does this for your good. If you receive unemployment for less time, you will find work faster! Finally, this is what the government claims, which uses its demagogic “anti-welfare” rhetoric and explains that if there is unemployment it is not because there are not enough positions, but because that the unemployed do not want to work.
Receiving less unemployment does not create jobs
In reality, these repressive measures obviously have no impact on employment. After having cut unemployment insurance in all directions (opening of rights, calculation of the amount, duration of compensation, policing) in the name of full employment, the results are there: 7.5% of the active population is unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2023 according to INSEE (+0.4% compared to 2022). The employers’ newspapers like to point out that there are 300,000 vacant jobs in France (which says nothing about the quality of these jobs). A drop in the ocean compared to the 2 million 300 thousand unemployed counted by INSEE who are and will be made more precarious by the Attal government’s measures.
Especially since this rate is expected to rise further in the coming months, due to the stagnation of European growth, the rise in interest rates which is slowing down the economy, but also the increase in the retirement age at pensions up to age 64 which forces workers to work longer, or to be unemployed rather than retired.
We are therefore very far from the myth of the street to cross to find a job, taken up by Attal on TF1 or by Catherine Vautrin, Minister of Labor, Thursday morning on France Info according to which it would be enough to “bring together those who are looking a job and those who offer it. An observation that the employees of Conforama, Stellantis and even of Thales, threatened by job cuts, PES or site closures, are not likely to share. The inflationary crisis has already caused the bankruptcy of thousands of companies in 2023 (+35% compared to 2022), and nearly 250,000 jobs would be threatened in 2024: but the problem is that the unemployed are lazy!
The same argument is applied to seniors, who according to Bruno Le Maire, have “no reason” to benefit from a longer period of compensation than the rest of workers (currently 27 months compared to 18 months for workers below 55 years old). Opponents of pension reform warned that postponing the retirement age would create old unemployed people, Bruno Le Maire found the solution: sweetening unemployment to force them to go to work. Except that as shown Landmarks based on Unedic figures, “at age 59 a senior finds himself compensated by unemployment insurance due to dismissal in 40% of cases or the end of a fixed-term contract in 34% of cases. At this age, more than one in four dismissals is due to incapacity. Likewise, unemployment among seniors is closely linked to a deterioration in their health after a life spent working, as well as to discrimination in hiring – in 2015, 75% of French managers considered the fact of be over 55 years old.
Basically, this new attack aims to attack all workers. On the one hand, because it pushes unemployed workers to accept any job, under any conditions: short, poorly paid contracts, in degraded, dangerous conditions…enough to accentuate competition between workers and drag down the working conditions and salaries of all.
But it makes the work precarious
Job creation in recent years (+1.2 million from 2019 to 2023) demonstrates this precariousness of work. These are low-quality, unproductive, precarious jobs that are largely subsidized by the state. Le Monde reported in December that over this period, added value – the wealth produced – increased by 2%, but the number of employees increased by 6.5%. Among these job creations, we must count apprenticeship contracts which today represent 900,000 jobs, largely subsidized by the State (the company receives €6,000 upon signing each contract and the State takes responsible for social security contributions).
Thus, the French capitalist economy needed a massive transfer of public money to be able to create or maintain jobs. The “Macron bonus” type schemes also had the function of allowing employers to cope with inflation, without increasing wages or paying contributions to unemployment and health insurance funds. Wages have fallen in relation to prices, public revenue has increased.
While the government now wants to find 50 billion euros in the public economy by 2027, some Macronists even dare to consider touching some of these devices, like learning. Which would amount to tearing down the house of cards, already affected by the economic slowdown, which will bring with it tens of thousands of jobs.
The measures announced by Gabriel Attal are therefore obviously not aimed at fighting unemployment but rather at preparing for it to rise again. It is better to lower the rights of the unemployed while they are still “low” and many workers do not feel concerned, or even consider the unemployed as “beneficiaries” responsible for what happens to them. However, it is urgent to unmask this propaganda. The solution lies in the unity of the ranks of workers, with or without jobs, against those who exploit and divide us.
To truly combat mass unemployment and create jobs, we must massively reduce working hours without reducing wages. Reducing working time over life (retirement at 60 at full rate), but also over the week (32 hours paid 35), this is the only way to give work to everyone instead of killing oneself at work or to kill oneself to find some. The capitalists will object that all this costs too much. On the contrary, we consider that deaths at work, burn-outs, physical wear and tear, the humiliation of bosses or at Pôle Emploi, the hours of life wasted for a boss, the permanent stigmatization against the unemployed and precariousness, everything it costs us way too much. And it is now up to the capitalists to pay!
2024-03-28 23:16:56
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