Senators pass and toughen bill

The Senators will have finally needed only one day, and not three, to examine the draft law on unemployment insurance. The Senate with a right-wing majority adopted the text on Tuesday evening at first reading after having hardened it. Deputies and senators will now try to agree on a common version in a joint committee.

This text, carried by the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt, initially plans to extend the current rules of unemployment insurance, resulting from a disputed reform of the first five-year Macron period and which expire on November 1. It also triggers the possibility, by decree, of modulating unemployment insurance according to the job market.

Companies have “difficulty recruiting”

The current system “remains built to respond to a concept of mass unemployment, without being a sufficient incentive to return to employment”, declared Olivier Dussopt, stressing that “60% of companies have difficulty recruiting”. This modulation mechanism is currently the subject of consultation between the government and the social partners which “should last 6 to 8 weeks to be completed by the end of the year”.

The rapporteurs Frédérique Puissat (LR) and Olivier Henno (centrist) have enshrined the principle of modulation in full in the law, with the support of the minister. On the other hand, the latter was unfavourable, in vain, to another measure introduced in committee, which provides that a jobseeker who has refused three CDI offers at the end of a fixed-term contract cannot be entitled to unemployment insurance. LR senators, however, failed to toughen this provision in the hemicycle. An amendment providing for the deprivation of compensation on first refusal was rejected with extreme accuracy.

The Senate also adopted another LR amendment aimed at excluding temporary workers from unemployment benefits who do not accept a CDI offered on the position they occupy as an interim.

For the left, the text “stigmatizes” the unemployed

The left is upwind against a text that “stigmatizes job seekers and makes them look like profiteers”. The PS and Ecologiste groups therefore contributed their votes to a procedural motion by the majority Communist CRCE group aimed at its outright rejection, which was nevertheless rejected.

“In order to give back the hand to the social partners”, the senators rewrote the first article of the text which provides for the extension of the current rules of unemployment insurance. The deadline of December 31, 2023 has been moved to August 31. This period “should be used to initiate consultations aimed at changing the governance of unemployment insurance”, indicated Frédérique Puissat. And another point rectified by the senatorial right: the parameters of the bonus-malus, a device which is intended to limit short contracts. In particular, the purposes of temporary assignments have been excluded from the scheme.