2024-10-21 05:00:00
CIt is an understatement to say that this report was expected. But as with anything that arouses strong impatience, the risk of disappointment is great. Thursday October 3, Antoine Bozio and Etienne Wasmer presented to the Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, a report on “policies of exemption from social contributions”. The two economists were commissioned by Elisabeth Borne when she was at Matignon, after the social conference in October 2023.
The objective of this work was in particular to understand how the system of reductions in employer social contributions, put in place in the 1990s to respond to the mass unemployment that France was experiencing, particularly among low-skilled populations, ended up trap many employees at the minimum wage level.
The phenomenon is all the more worrying given that with the inflationary context, “smicards” are ever more numerous. The minimum wage being indexed to inflation, it has increased considerably in recent years, going from 1,554.58 euros gross, at the start of 2021, to 1,766.92 euros, at the start of 2024. As a result, many employees who had higher salaries , but which have not or have been little increased, have been caught up. At 1is January 2023, 17% of private sector employees were paid at the minimum wage level.
Thirty years of policies never evaluated
Since 2022, successive governments, up to that of Michel Barnier, have all claimed to want to act to make work pay better. And thus put an end to a phenomenon highlighted by Antoine Foucher in Getting out of a job that no longer pays (L’Aube, 144 pages, 17 euros).
The former director of Muriel Pénicaud’s cabinet, when she was Minister of Labor, draws up, with supporting figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, the observation that, for around fifteen years, work no longer allows most people to improve their standard of living. Until 1980, it took around fifteen years of work to live twice as well; a delay that amounted to around forty years between the 1980s and 2000. Since then, it would take more than eighty years of work to double one’s standard of living.
If the process which led to the fragmentation of workers’ purchasing power took decades, reversing this trend will not happen in the snap of a finger. This is the observation made by the authors of the report. To delve into the three hundred pages of this document is to immerse yourself in thirty years of policies added and stacked without the results of the previous one being really evaluated. A complexity that almost locks the system today.
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