The “full employment” bill will “mechanically” lead to an increase in the number of jobseekers registered with Pôle emploi with the reform of the RSA, said Wednesday the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, without this necessarily rise in unemployment. Currently, only 40% of RSA beneficiaries are registered with Pôle Emploi. The reform provides that the approximately 1.9 million beneficiaries are all automatically registered with France Travail, the successor to Pôle emploi. “This will automatically increase the number of job seekers registered with Pôle Emploi”, indicated Mr. Dussopt, after the presentation of the bill to the Council of Ministers. But this will have no impact on the unemployment figures within the meaning of the International Labor Office (ILO) provided by INSEE, those “on which the State has been communicating for at least 20 years” and “which have not not much to do in reality with the number of job seekers registered with Pôle Emploi”, he added.
The two organizations do not measure unemployment in the same way: Pôle emploi counts the job seekers registered on its lists divided into several categories (A, B, C, D, E), while the INSEE figure, which allows international comparisons, is the result of a survey carried out each quarter on a sample of dwellings. As part of the reform, “we are working with Pôle emploi – which will become France Travail – on this question of the categories of jobseekers registered with Pôle emploi”, because the registration of 100% of the recipients (of the RSA) will require ” that some of them are registered in categories exempted from seeking employment”.
For some, this research is in fact “virtually impossible, even totally impossible” for reasons in particular “of health or extremely difficult integration paths”, he underlined. “So we are working on this, it has not been successful because it is an internal reflection on the operator that is Pôle emploi and what will be France Travail”, he specified.
