Life changes, disguised dismissals: a variety of situations behind negotiated terminations.

At 50, Mathieu Kilhoffer had been working in plastics for an automotive subcontractor for 27 years, 25 of them on night shifts. "My body was less and less able to keep up," he recalls, two years after having benefited from a negotiated termination agreement.

The site where he worked was experiencing difficulties, and management had "made it clear that any requests for negotiated departures would be considered," reports this man from Alsace. He obtained one, before leaving to work for a fishing federation, his passion.

"If I hadn't been able to benefit from it, I think medically, things wouldn't have gone well. From time to time, I was off work for a week, two weeks, because I had trouble sleeping," he confides. Shortly afterward, the site closed its doors.

Oriane, in her thirties, worked in Paris for a social and solidarity economy association, where she managed the media outlet. Because this media outlet was going to shut down, which would have led her to take on a role unrelated to her training, she requested and obtained a negotiated termination agreement.

"This allowed me to have the guarantee of unemployment benefits while I launched my new business" as a freelance journalist, she explains.

"Hyper-marginal"

Both employees and employers quickly embraced this amicable separation scheme allowing employees to receive unemployment benefits, which was initiated by the Medef and created in 2008.

In 2024, 515.000 individual negotiated terminations were signed, representing unemployment benefit expenditures of 9,4 billion euros, 26% of the total of these benefits, according to Unédic.

Too expensive, according to the government, which denounces the "abuses" of employees who are allegedly taking advantage of "a right to claim unemployment benefits." It has given social partners until the end of January to negotiate on the issue, with a target of €400 million in savings per year.

Employers' organizations even want to increase savings for unemployment insurance to one billion euros. The next meeting is scheduled for January 7th.

"This figure of the unemployed-optimizer or the one who 'takes it easy' does not exist or is extremely marginal," insists economist Camille Signoretto, calling for "attention to be paid to the heterogeneity of situations."

According to a study by the Institute for Public Policy, the majority of negotiated terminations replace resignations rather than dismissals, so limiting them could generate "situations where employees are stuck in their jobs and less productive," warns the researcher.

While the employee who has used a negotiated termination agreement is more often an executive and more qualified than the average unemployed person, these terminations are more often signed in small, or even very small, companies without a human resources department, points out Ms. Signoretto.

Hélène, general manager in recent years of a cosmetics marketing company with seven employees in Isère, has thus resorted three times to negotiated terminations, at the initiative of employees.

"If someone isn't a good fit for our team, we might as well let them go," she believes. "We could have saved a little money by letting people resign, but we didn't want the hassle," she explains. "In a small organization, we have so many things to manage."

She remembers "a woman who created chaos in the company atmosphere, who turned everyone against each other." When she requested a negotiated termination, management jumped at the chance to "get rid of her without any stress."

At the other end of the spectrum, Arthur, 37, head of purchasing in a large company, did "everything" to push an employee on his team to accept a negotiated termination.

"She was returning from maternity leave and we learned that she had moved more than 500 km from headquarters," he summarizes.

Even though in his CAC40 company, "mutual termination agreements are not commonplace," he alerted human resources. "I was afraid she would go on repeated sick leave," he argued, considering a mutual termination agreement "simpler" than a dismissal.