Who will benefit from the law on value sharing, adopted by Parliament?

The National Assembly voted without incident this Wednesday on the bill on value sharing. The text thus arrives at the end of a parliamentary journey which began just after the conflagration of pension reform. At the time, the government counted on its content to ease social tensions. Thus, the final text voted on today faithfully reproduces the national inter-professional agreement (ANI) on value sharing signed at the start of the year by employers and unions (with the notable exception of the CGT).

So that employees can better benefit from the profits, the text provides in particular for experimental schemes for five years. The most significant extends to companies with 11 to 49 employees the obligation to put in place value-sharing mechanisms (profit-sharing, bonuses or participation) as soon as they have generated a net profit at least equal to 1% of their turnover for three consecutive years. The majority's estimates indicate a measure which will benefit “more than 1.5 million employees”.

As for companies with at least 50 employees, they will have to negotiate sharing arrangements in the event of exceptional profits. It remains to define the extraordinary nature of a benefit. The text examined today provides that this definition is the result of a negotiation between the social partners within each company which must take into account “criteria such as the size of the company, the sector of activity.. .”.

The fact remains that the bonuses will obviously only concern employees whose company makes a profit. Indeed, the average amount of participation bonuses is higher in SMEs (€1,930 on average in 2019) than in large companies (€1,271 on average). Conversely, large companies use this type of tool more systematically. Currently, while 89% of people employed in companies with more than 1,000 employees are covered by a value sharing system, this is only 20% in companies with 11 to 49 employees. With this bill, the majority hopes to reach 60 to 65% of employees covered in the medium term compared to 53% in 2020.