Unemployment insurance: tightening of the rules on July 1

The government is accelerating. After explaining for several months that it wanted to tighten unemployment insurance rules, the Ministry of Labor decided to take action. In a press release published this Monday afternoon, Catherine Vautrin's entourage announced that a new deficiency decree will apply "from July 1". This is a rapid acceleration of the schedule. Until then, the Prime Minister was counting on it coming into force in the fall.

The new package of measures should take up the constraints set out in the framework letter sent to the social partners last summer and add a tightening of compensation rules. However, these have not been stopped at the moment. If it is now the State which holds the pen, the minister assured that she wanted to consult the unions and employers' organizations. “There is no question of receiving without listening and taking into account,” says the Ministry of Labor.

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The date of July 1 was not chosen at random. It is on this date that the previous unemployment insurance agreement ends. Without a government decree, the regime would have had to stop. This decision also comes a few days after the failure of negotiations on the employment of seniors. The unions and employers met at the start of the year to make progress on this issue while the pension reform will force the majority of French people to work until the age of 64. Alas, the endless negotiations on this point never came to fruition. After a final session on Monday April 21 and Tuesday April 22, the two camps parted ways with an impasse. As a result, the entire agreement reached a few months earlier on the future of unemployment insurance has become obsolete. Noting the inability of the social partners to find a consensus, the State therefore regains control of the regime for the next three years. This is the second time in a row that the situation has occurred after the 2019-2023 period.

The document does not currently contain more information on the content of these new measures. One thing is certain, it will be an additional turn of the screw. One system seems to be in favor of the Matignon tenant today: toughening the conditions to be able to be covered. Today you must have worked six months in the previous 24 months. The head of government sees it as “a system which is organized for the multiplication of small contracts, short contracts, between which we benefit from unemployment: “I work for a few months, I receive unemployment for a few months, I work again for a few months, I am receiving unemployment”

Questioned on the TF1 set, the Prime Minister did not rule out other avenues, such as reducing the maximum duration of compensation. This is now 18 months, compared to two years previously. The idea could be to gradually bring it up to 12 months.

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