The Upper House gives the green light. The Senate with a right-wing majority voted on Monday evening two key articles of the bill “for full employment”, providing for the automatic registration of RSA beneficiaries on the list of job seekers and the generalization of a “contract of ‘commitment’, despite opposition from the left. Carried by the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, this bill should give birth to the France Travail network, including Pôle emploi as the main operator, to better coordinate the actors of the public employment service. The executive is betting on this transformation to achieve full employment, i.e. an unemployment rate of around 5% in 2027 (against 7.1% currently), with the backdrop of the idea that “no one is unemployable”.
After rejecting two motions to reject the text as a whole brought by the communists and environmentalists, the senators adopted the first two articles by a show of hands. Article 1 provides that will be automatically entered on the list of job seekers, in addition to job seekers, beneficiaries of active solidarity income (RSA) as well as their spouse, and young people followed by local missions . Today only 40% of the beneficiaries of the active solidarity income (RSA) are registered with Pôle emploi. The left tried unsuccessfully to delete this article, “breaking with the fundamental principles of our social protection”, according to the ecologist Raymonde Poncet Monge. Similarly, it failed to delete Article 2, unifying the rights and duties of all persons registered on the list of job seekers by the generalization of an employment contract. The text “attacks the poor but above all not poverty”, castigated the socialist Emilienne Poumirol.
At the initiative of the rapporteur LR Pascale Gruny, the senators have provided for this contract to set a weekly duration of at least 15 hours of activity (immersions, refreshers, CV writing, etc.), while the government favors flexibility to take special situations into account. “The government’s objective is that a maximum of recipients can benefit from 15 to 20 hours of activity per week”, underlined the minister, but for some, “the 15-hour walk can sometimes seem difficult to access from the first shot,” he said.
The Senate will continue on Tuesday the examination of the bill which will not be submitted to the National Assembly until the fall. In the same “logic of rights and duties”, it makes it easier to implement sanctions for recipients who do not respect their obligations. Before the ax of a radiation – little applied – the payment of the RSA could be suspended in the event of breach, with a retroactive regularization when the person respects his commitments again. The senators limited in committee to three months of RSA the sums which could thus be paid retroactively.
The text has aroused the concern of associations helping the poorest, who see it as a “risk of social regression”. “Increasing the constraints is not the solution and reinforces the stigmatization of people”, thus warned an associative collective, including ATD Fourth World and Catholic Relief Services. In a column published Monday by Le Monde, joined by the CGT, CFDT and Unsa unions, these associations are particularly alarmed at the possibility of temporarily depriving beneficiaries of their allowance, an “unworthy” solution according to them.
In committee, the senators maintained the name of Pôle emploi, to “avoid any confusion” with the France Travail network. The government had planned for Pôle emploi to call itself France Travail on January 1, 2024 and to be the chief operator of this network. The text has two other sections: one which aims to improve the access of people with disabilities to employment in the ordinary environment and the other on early childhood which recognizes the municipalities as “organizing authorities” of reception, with a mission to identify needs, inform families and build the offer.