2024-10-29 17:05:00
Are we heading towards a second day of solidarity which would help replenish Social Security coffers? In any case, it is a little music that rises during the – difficult – budgetary debates and the quest for new recipes or alternatives to measures that displease parliamentarians. A little music that the government lets prosper.
“Establishing a second day of solidarity is a very interesting proposal,” admitted Sunday on LCI the Minister of Economy and Finance, Antoine Armand, when questioned on the subject. Again on Tuesday. “This is part of the debates that we will have in Parliament, the government has not proposed it but I believe that certain parliamentarians want to present it,” Budget Minister Laurent Saint-Martin responded Tuesday morning on TF1.
In a good way
And the minister assured that “everything that allows our country to show that we can work harder to participate in the recovery effort is going in the right direction”. In short, it is open to debate, while insisting on the “flexibility” that should then be left to companies in the choice of this day.
“The question behind it is that of working time. Is it a public holiday, a day off? Different formulas could be considered,” adds an advisor to the executive, who nevertheless specifies, cautiously: “In any case, the government, to date, is not carrying out such an initiative and we will see in the framework of the parliamentary debate if it progresses. »
At Matignon, caution also dominates on this issue. “It is a subject which has been addressed by parliamentarians, the government is therefore in a position to listen,” says the entourage of Prime Minister Michel Barnier.
Alternatives
But if the deputies of the central “bloc” behind Michel Barnier have not tabled amendments to this effect for the current discussion of the Social Security financing bill (PLFSS), the debate is agitating their ranks. They see it as an alternative to certain measures proposed by the government, including the reduction in exemptions from social charges granted to businesses, or the six-month postponement of the indexation of retirement pensions.
In “Les Echos” at the beginning of October, Gérald Darmanin said he was “in favor of eliminating a second public holiday in both the public and private sectors. » Deputy Mathieu Lefèvre, vice-president of the EPR (Together for the Republic) group in charge of finances, would welcome the fact that this day replaces the plan proposed by the government on exemptions from social contributions which causes, at within the EPR group, a real outcry.
In the Social Affairs Committee, the PLFSS article containing it – which could be examined in session Tuesday evening – had also been rejected by the group’s commissioners. “We are aligned on the need to increase the workload to reduce deficits,” he says. He is betting that the government will eventually abandon this plan, which meets with hostility from businesses, in favor of a day of solidarity.
Rather than yet another unemployment insurance reform
Tuesday morning, during the meeting of the Ensemble pour la République group, former Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said, according to participants, “rather than yet another reform of unemployment insurance, we must study the possibility of ‘a second day of solidarity’. This, after a breakfast of group presidents of the bloc around the Prime Minister during which each recalled their red lines, said the imagined alternatives and the “war goals” hoped for at the end of the budgetary debates.
“We have to find savings and consensus. Ten years ago, it was a totem. Today, there are so many battles to fight that this day could be a solution,” imagines an EPR executive.
In the Senate, on which the government will particularly rely, the centrist rapporteur for the Social Security budget, Elisabeth Doineau, has already said she is in favor of such a measure. François Patriat, president of the RDPI group, is also in favor.
The prospect meets hostility from the unions. Employers’ organizations are calling for an increase in working hours. They therefore welcome the measure positively in principle. But they are wary of its concrete translation. “If in the end it’s the companies that pay, what’s the point? » summarizes a manager, who recalls that “at the end of the day, the solidarity day increased the costs of companies by 0.3% of the payroll”, without the additional day worked necessarily resulting in an additional figure business.
1730250220
#Social #security #government #open #debate #elimination #public #holiday
