Work stoppages: the Medef opposed to the increase in waiting days

“Passing on the Social Security expense to companies is not the right method,” said the president of the employers' organization Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux during a press conference.

“In many companies and collective agreements the waiting days”, three in number in the private sector, “are taken care of” by the employer, he added.

During the Public Finance Conference on Monday, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire noted that "in 2022 we had 8,8 million sick leaves in France, against 6,4 million ten years earlier".

The minister wants to initiate consultations by the fall to find the "most effective instruments to fight against these abuses".

An "explosion" of work stoppages has been observed "everywhere in Europe", continued Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, who specified that the increase was due to "short-term" stops. "It explodes among young people and executives" and "it explodes (...) on certain days of the week", he detailed.

"There is a problem of work stoppages of convenience," said the boss of Medef.

But "there are also questions of malaise and malaise at work," he acknowledged.

The Medef must "reflect on managerial practices", and on "the reasons why in certain cases this feeling of ill-being increases", according to Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux.

The Medef boss declared himself in favor of a "public order measure" which would take the form of a "waiting day which could not be reimbursed by anyone".

A waiting day in the public service was introduced in 2012 by Nicolas Sarkozy and then abolished by François Hollande, before being reinstated by Emmanuel Macron.

For its part, the Confederation of SMEs ruled in a press release published Monday that public and private employees should be housed in the same boat.

For the CPME, "bringing only employers in the private sector to bear an increase in the fraction remaining at their expense would be an easy solution consisting in unloading on employers a responsibility that the State would not be ready to assume" .