The government presented to the Council of Ministers, Wednesday, June 7, its bill “for full employment”, which should give birth to France Travail, an organization dedicated to succeeding Pôle emploi. This project aims in particular to set up more personalized and directive support for RSA recipients.
The executive is banking on this transformation to achieve full employment, i.e. an unemployment rate of around 5% in 2027 (compared to 7.1% currently), by targeting people who are far from employment.
Despite the sharp decline in unemployment in recent years and labor shortages in many sectors, the number of RSA beneficiaries has hardly decreased since 2017, with around 1.8 million beneficiaries.
In this context, the creation of France Travail, planned by January 1, 2025, aims to better coordinate the actors of the public employment service, characterized “by its atomicity and complexity”, explained the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, after the Council of Ministers.
Bringing together job search and social assistance
It is a question of having the same entry procedure for all people looking for a job or encountering integration difficulties, regardless of the door they knock on. The idea is that a person applying for RSA at the family allowance fund finds himself at the same time registered with France Travail, whereas today only 40% of RSA beneficiaries are at Pôle emploi.
This automatic registration with France Travail, on the basis of common criteria, will allow “rapid entry into the support path” and “visibility on all people looking for work in a territory”, underlines- we at Matignon.
Each registered with France Travail will sign “a contract of engagement”. It is in this context that renewed support for RSA recipients is being tested in eighteen departments with the sensitive issue of fifteen to twenty hours of work per week.
Not formally enshrined in law, these hours will have an objective “adapted” to each person, said the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt. It will be “neither free work nor compulsory volunteering”, he repeated, in the face of fears from associations fighting against poverty.
France Travail and all the actors (for example, local missions for young people, Cap Emploi for people with disabilities, or even local authorities) will have to operate in a network. France Travail will be the chief operator of this network. “It is not a question of making an institutional big bang, but of playing collectively”, summarized Elisabeth Borne, while some elected officials denounce, like Regions of France, “a recentralizing project”.
“Submit RSA recipients to the same control as the unemployed”
For the Minister of Labor, “what is wrong is the support. 350,000 recipients have no follow-up, and we are not free from our duty of solidarity with 607 euros (the amount of the RSA for a single person) ”.
In a survey published at the start of the year, 61% of RSA beneficiaries said they had a “need for help in professional or social matters” which was not met. In this “logic of rights and duties”, the bill also makes it easier to implement sanctions for recipients who do not meet their obligations.
To strengthen support, there will be “additional means”, assured Olivier Dussopt, while referring to discussions on the next budget. The report prefiguring the reform quantified its cost “between 2 and 2.5 billion euros cumulatively until 2027”.
Before the ax of a radiation – little applied currently –, the adviser will now be able, unless opposed by the president of the departmental council, to suspend the payment of the RSA in the event of breach, with a retroactive regularization when the person respects his commitments again.
The government wants to “subject RSA recipients to the same control as the unemployed”. “It stigmatizes them deeply,” denounced the general secretary of the CGT, Sophie Binet. Marylise Léon, deputy secretary general of the CFDT, believes that the conditionality of the RSA “is a red line”. “The biggest stigma is keeping people in precariousness,” replied Olivier Dussopt.
The text, which will first be examined in the Senate in early July, has two other parts: one on disability, which aims to improve the access of people with disabilities to employment in the mainstream, and the other on early childhood, which recognizes the municipalities as “organizing authorities” of childcare, with the mission of identifying needs, informing families and building the offer.
