The Denmark should have contributed twelve months

Small cause, big effect: after the CGT and FO, the decision taken yesterday by the TCRC to not ratify the new Unedic convention project may sound the death knell of this attempt of deep revision of the rules of the unemployment compensation. The approval of the reform by the only CFDT (and, perhaps, by the GSC, which will decide Tuesday, January 20) exposes this Protocol either exercise the "right opposition" created by the Fillon law for the benefit of majority unions, or the rejection of the convention before the Higher Council for employment.

But this compromise developed before Christmas makes our unemployment insurance system both more fair and more efficient. Two elements play in the sense of a jump to fairness. The first is the affirmation of the principle that a day of assessment should give right to a day of recovery. There is this a condition and a limit. The condition is to have worked four months past twenty-eight months, the limit is the period of compensation, fixed in the agreement for 24 months. These new provisions correct a perversity of the 2006 convention, which is to create effects of threshold: currently, an applicant for employment who worked 15 months not is compensated only twelve months, while another, with an extra month of work, can receive allowances up to twenty-three months.

While there an another through the current scheme which is to favour part-time to contracts contracts full time: today, 455 hours of work part-time are sufficient to acquire seven months of rights, while it takes two times more (910) full time. "The rights have a duration which is not directly related to the actual duration of contributions, creating negative incentives", were, in April 2007, in "Societal", Bruno Coquet and Arnaud Sylvain, economists of the Centre for employment studies. The second factor of fairness of the project comes from the greater compulsion to "recurrent" job-seekers: it provides a minimum of six months of work in the year to find the right to compensation. This is a clause of morality to strengthen the incentive to work and to support the reasonable offer of employment.

However, to make it simpler and more equitable, the Protocol does not make unemployment insurance to the French less generous or less effective a performance! Here again, two innovations to compete. The first, mentioned above, is the relaxation of the conditions for membership in the plan: with the reform, four month of contributions would be sufficient (over a period of twenty-eight months!) instead of six now in the twenty-two months past. This should allow the system to no longer spinning through its cracks as many young people in the early days of chaotic career and women in part-time or precarious contract, categories most affected by the sharp rise of unemployment.

Treat this Achilles heel appears today as a social emergency. "The system of compensation to the unemployed remained insensitive to the development of new categories of unemployed generated by the evolution of the labour market," notes Carole Tuchszirer researcher in the latest issue of "International Chronicle", published by the Institute of economic and social research (Ires). In abeyance the question of long-term unemployment, but with a maximum compensation of twenty-three (or even twenty-four) months, the France is among the most generous countries of OECD, with the exception of the Belgium and the Denmark... The Germany provides up to 24 months of compensation but subject to forty-eight month of contributions. The Denmark should have contributed twelve months. The France is also, it should be recalled, the countries of Europe where the ceiling of compensation (5.643 euros per month) is very far, the highest in Europe, three times higher than that of the Germany.

The second source of efficiency is in the simplification made to the functioning of the scheme, as four channels depending on the length of previous assessment, the draft agreement provides substitute one. But a good insurance first is easily understandable insurance. Can trade unions prohibit to do with the unemployment compensation that public authorities have been for the support of the unemployed by creating pole employment In rejecting this Protocol, no doubt more to accompany the hardening of the social climate for reasons of substance, the majority of them is the worst choices at a time when unemployment is packaged: that of the status quo, the maintenance of a system very complex, somewhat equitable and relatively ineffective. The danger is that, as elsewhere in the economy, the State intervene without complex to repair itself unemployment coverage holes.