Social security budget: the National Assembly wants to encourage professional sectors to increase their minimum benefits.

The four left-wing groups, the National Rally (RN), and the Liot group submitted identical amendments, aiming to push the sectors concerned to raise their minimum wages. While it is illegal to pay employees below the minimum wage, such pay scales lead to a "squeezing" of low wages.

According to figures from the Directorate General for Labour published in October, 11% of the 171 sectors analyzed had minimum wages below the minimum wage, "of which only two sectors had been non-compliant for more than a year".

The general rapporteur for the Social Security budget, Thibault Bazin (LR), opposed the measure, arguing that while the cause is "legitimate", "it is not in a Social Security budget that one modifies the Labour Code".

He raised a risk of unconstitutionality, as the measure creates a "collective sanction for companies in the sectors concerned, even when the companies themselves comply with our legislation".

RN MP Gaëtan Dussausaye defended the proposal in the name of defending "workers' purchasing power".

The Minister for Public Accounts took it up on it, detecting a "contradiction" between the RN's line "on the airwaves" and "in the chamber".

"All day long you say 'We are protecting the company'", but with the amendment passed "there is a boss of a small business who pays his employees well (...) above the minimum wage, who will have general tax relief reduced because there is somewhere, at the other end of the country, a sector with which he has no contact, over which he has no influence and which cannot reach a negotiation on a sectoral minimum," she protested.