Stalled Revolution: France’s Unemployment Insurance Reform Grinds to a Halt

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The Minister of Labor instructs unions and employers to conclude quickly, on the basis of the agreement they reached in November 2023 and which had not been approved. On the senior side, they could agree on an extension of progressive retirement.

Goodbye to the Attal reform of unemployment insurance, which planned to once again tighten the conditions of access and reduce the duration of compensation. The new Minister of Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, sent a letter on Wednesday, October 9 in the evening to all representative employers’ and trade union organizations to officially instruct them to reopen negotiations on the rules for compensating those deprived of employment. , but also on the employment of seniors. “I invite you to conduct these discussions as soon as possible, the current unemployment insurance rules expiring, as you know, on October 31,” she writes in this letter addressed to the general secretaries and presidents of the eight organizations concerned (CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC and CFTC on the union side; Medef, CPME, U2P on the employer side).

Since the negotiation is unlikely to succeed by the end of the month, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet also announces that a “decree extending existing rules will be published”, for an unspecified period. As the minister points out, and as the Council of State has made it known, risks of legal uncertainty are beginning to weigh on these repeated extensions (this will be the fourth since January). From a union source, the extension