The reform of unemployment insurance, which the government wants to undertake this year, is not the most urgent to carry out, indicated Thursday the president of Medef Patrick Martin on board the plane which took him to Canada with Gabriel Attal. “Yes, we need to go further on unemployment insurance, but I don’t know if this reform has a degree of urgency. The most urgent reform is economic dynamics,” declared the leading French business leader.
After the failure of negotiations on the employment of seniors, the Minister of Labor Catherine Vautrin announced Wednesday that the government could regain control of unemployment insurance through a decree of default, if the social partners do not complete by now Monday the convention that they negotiated in the fall with an amendment on compensation for older unemployed workers.
Gabriel Attal also announced in March a new reform of unemployment insurance starting this year, which should tighten the conditions of compensation for job seekers. “Government expressions disrupted the negotiations and created tensions, particularly regarding the seniors regime,” according to Patrick Martin. He explained that “the unions were destabilized” because during the negotiations, “the State was relaunching a reform of unemployment insurance.” “We can talk about failure. We wanted an agreement,” regretted the president of Medef. “Anything that disrupts negotiations weighs on the social climate of businesses.”
He pointed out the fact that the orientation document which framed the negotiations on the employment of seniors was very restrictive: “We could not spend anything”. The talks came up against the creation of an enforceable right to progressive retirement, he said: “It would have cost 300 million euros.” Patrick Martin estimated that Gabriel Attal has “sincere attention to social partners, but he does not have the practice that Elisabeth Borne or Jean Castex had due to their previous positions”. “But I don’t perceive any negative thoughtfulness. We discover each other,” he added.
