The government relies on France Travail to move towards full employment

The executive is betting on this transformation to achieve full employment, i.e. an unemployment rate of around 5% in 2027 (against 7,1% currently) by targeting people who are far from employment.

Despite the sharp drop in unemployment in recent years and labor shortages in many sectors, the number of RSA beneficiaries has hardly decreased since 2017, around 1,9 million.

In this context, the creation of France Travail, by January 1, 2025 at the latest, aims to better coordinate the actors of the public employment service characterized "by its atomicity and complexity", explained the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt after the Council of Ministers.

It is a question of having the same entry procedure for all people looking for work or encountering integration difficulties, regardless of the door they knock on.

The idea is that a person applying for RSA at the CAF finds himself at the same time registered with France Travail, whereas today only 40% of RSA beneficiaries are at Pôle emploi.

The public operator and all the actors (local missions for young people, Cap emploi for disabled people, but also local authorities, etc.) will have to work better in a network with connected systems.

Pôle emploi will call itself France Travail and will be the chief operator of this network. Far from an institutional big bang - each keeping their skills -, it is a question of "playing collectively", according to Elisabeth Borne, while some elected officials denounce, like Regions of France, "a recentralizing project".

Support course

This automatic registration with France Travail, on the basis of common criteria, will allow "rapid entry into the support course" and "visibility on all people looking for work in a territory", underlines-t- we at Matignon.

Each member of France Travail will sign "a contract of engagement". It is in this context that renewed support for RSA recipients is being tested in 18 departments with the sensitive issue of 15 to 20 hours of work per week.

Not formally enshrined in law, these hours (immersions, refreshers, CV writing, etc.) will be an “adapted” objective for everyone, said Olivier Dussopt. It will be "neither free work nor compulsory volunteering", he repeated in the face of the fears of associations fighting against poverty.

For the Minister of Labor, "what is wrong is the support. 350.000 recipients have no follow-up and we are not free from our duty of solidarity with 607 euros" (amount of RSA for a single person, editor's note).

Easier penalty

In this "logic of rights and duties", the bill makes it easier to implement sanctions for recipients who do not meet their obligations.

Before the ax of a radiation - little applied - the adviser will now be able, unless opposed by the president of the departmental council, to suspend the payment of the RSA in the event of breach, with a retroactive regularization when the person respects his commitments again.

The government wants "to subject RSA recipients to the same control as the unemployed", "it deeply stigmatizes them", denounced Sophie Binet (CGT) while for Marylise Léon (CFDT), the conditionality of RSA "is a red line" .

"The greatest stigma is to keep people in precariousness," replied Olivier Dussopt.

To strengthen the support, there will be "additional means", he assured, while referring to the discussions on the next budget.

The report prefiguring the reform quantified its cost "between 2 and 2,5 billion euros cumulatively until 2027". A part could be financed from the unemployment insurance budget.

The text, which will be examined in the Senate at the beginning of July, has two other sections: one on disability, which aims to improve the access of people with disabilities to employment in the ordinary environment, and the other on early childhood, which recognizes municipalities as "organizing authorities" for reception, with the mission of identifying needs, informing families and
build the offer.