Companies will have to wait a little longer. Much awaited by the economic world in the grip of a recession of unprecedented magnitude, the 100 billion euro stimulus plan that Prime Minister Jean Castex was to detail on Tuesday will not finally be revealed until next week. Because the executive prefers to devote itself entirely, in the coming days, to preparing for a return to school in the shadow of the Covid-19, in companies as in schools.
The decision was taken after the working lunch between Emmanuel Macron and his Prime Minister Jean Castex, Friday at Fort Brégançon (Var). It should not be seen “neither greater concern on the health situation nor the sign that the plan would not be ready”, assures one to the Elysee. It is a question of “doing things in order so that the re-entry takes place in confidence and that each one appropriates the new measures”.
A defense council on Tuesday
“We are not going to put our countries at a standstill but we will have to live with the virus,” Emmanuel Macron insisted on Thursday. This is why the government intends to prepare in detail the implementation, from September 1, of the obligation to wear a mask in companies, but also in middle and high schools.
A defense council will therefore be held on Tuesday morning around the Head of State, before the re-entry council of ministers, postponed to Wednesday. For his part, the Minister of National Education Jean-Michel will receive from Monday the unions of the teaching world, when the services of the Secretary of State for Occupational Health Laurent Pietraszewski will conduct consultations to adapt to the new health situation, particularly in slaughterhouses, major sources of contamination, or collective accommodation. “We will of course apply the measures to protect our employees according to the instructions of the High Council of Public Health, but with regard to the masks we would like a less standardized and a little less Jacobin approach”, pleads the president of Medef Geoffroy Roux de Bezieux in an interview published on jdd.fr.
The implementation schedule is not called into question
The one who will welcome Jean Castex on Wednesday at the Medef summer university, at the Paris-Longchamp racecourse, does not take offense at the postponement of the recovery plan. “What matters is the substance,” he says. “The plan is ready,” we assure the Ministry of the Economy, where it is recalled that 460 billion euros of emergency measures have already been put on the table since March 15. And the implementation schedule of the device, which must be submitted to parliamentarians as part of the finance bill for 2021, is not called into question.
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What did the government do over the summer?
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“This stimulus plan should have been ready since mid-July, however criticizes the president of the senators Les Républicains Bruno Retailleau. So what did the government do during the summer? All this is very worrying for our businesses and our jobs.” On the left, the national secretary of Europe Ecology-Les Verts (EELV) Julien Bayou also considers “surprising that the government is procrastinating so much while the emergency is there”.
Because what all the experts feared in the spring is becoming clearer: the return of massive social plans. Between March 1 and August 16, 326 job protection plans (PSE) were registered by the Ministry of Labor, against 228 a year earlier. 49,000 jobs have thus disappeared. “Usually, the average low water level is between 50 and 500 threatened jobs, notes Marine Roussannes, director of the business changes and restructuring department at LLH. There, it goes from 300 to more than 5,000 layoffs.” And the end of the year and the first quarter of 2021 are shaping up to be even darker, given the many plans in the works.
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