Unions are calling on the government to formally abandon a comprehensive reform of unemployment insurance

The five representative trade unions of employees and two employers' organizations, with the exception of the Medef, are asking the government to formally abandon its plan for new negotiations on unemployment insurance, in a joint letter seen by AFP.

In this letter addressed Friday evening to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC and CFTC, on the union side, and the CPME and U2P (artisans), on the employer side, ask him to withdraw the financial framework which had been communicated in August by the Bayrou government to set the desired savings on unemployment insurance.

This withdrawal, they explain, should allow them to open "in the coming weeks, interprofessional negotiations on the issue of short-term contracts." These negotiations "will also be an opportunity to examine the issue of mutually agreed terminations," according to their letter.

Since the fall of the Bayrou government, Sébastien Lecornu has seemed to abandon the idea of a new comprehensive reform of unemployment insurance in order to target "mutual terminations (which) can lead to abuses".

Labor Minister Jean-Pierre Farandou emphasized on Thursday that he had "proposed to the social partners" that they "take up" this issue. "We would like to move quite quickly to find a few hundred million euros in savings," he told Le Parisien.

Such a discussion would take place, the unions argue in their letter, "in a comprehensive and balanced approach, with the shared objective of strengthening the quality of employment and securing career paths".

In its policy framework letter in August, the Bayrou government asked social partners to negotiate a new unemployment insurance agreement, achieving savings of 2 to 2,5 billion euros per year between 2026 and 2029.

She set November 15 as the deadline for an agreement, but the discussions never took place.

The social partners are responsible for negotiating the rules for unemployment compensation, but if they fail to reach an agreement, the State defines the rules by decree.

This letter was deemed unacceptable by the unions, particularly because of the scale of the efforts demanded, while the main rules of the latest reform, dating from November 2024, had come into effect last April, theoretically for four years.

"We have not stopped asking the government to renounce the framework letter and we continue to ask them to abandon it explicitly in writing, otherwise it will be a sword of Damocles with decrees that could come to us very soon or with another government that would tell us that we have not respected the framework letter," the CGT confederate secretary, Denis Gravouil, told AFP.