For Elisabeth Borne, “full employment is within reach”

May 24, 2022

“Full employment is within reach,” said Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne during the handover of power on Monday with her successor at the Ministry of Labor, Olivier Dussopt.

“I am proud today to leave this ministry when full employment is within reach, the unemployment rate is at its lowest in 15 years, the youth unemployment rate is at its lowest in 40 years and never so low. no French had had a job,” said Ms. Borne by way of assessment, passing her hand on the steps of the Hôtel du Châtelet.

“These results are first and foremost the fruit of necessary, demanding reforms,” she continued, referring in particular to that of unemployment insurance, which she carried out, and which, she said. , “accompanies the French better while setting a clear line: it is always the work that must pay”.

The full employment threshold is set at an unemployment rate between 5% and 5.5%. It was 7.3% in the first quarter of 2022.

“You are taking up your duties in a ministry with a changed name and even higher ambitions”, since it has become the Ministry of Labour, Full Employment and Integration, she underlined, addressing Mr. Dussopt.

She also recalled that 730,000 apprenticeship contracts had been signed in 2021, twice as many as in 2017. “Your mission, dear Olivier, will be to bring this figure to one million signed contracts”, she said. enjoins his successor.

Ms. Borne also greeted the social partners, unions and employers, who “are the beating heart of our social life. They are demanding, it’s normal and each project must be discussed, studied, built with them”, a-t -she says.

For his part, Olivier Dussopt, describing himself as “son of workers” and “product of too rare a social ascent that work must allow”, recalled that he would have the heavy task of carrying out the “necessary pension reform ” and that he intended to “dialogue and concert” with the social partners so that it “is carried out successfully” and that it is “as fair as it is responsible”.

Regarding the social partners, Mr. Dussopt, who was Minister Delegate in charge of Public Accounts in the Castex government, announced that he was going to “receive them all this week in order to discuss with them their projects and their expectations”, and to “immediately establish a working relationship and, I hope, a relationship of trust”.

Asked about LCI on Monday morning, the secretary general of the CFDT, Laurent Berger, reaffirmed that “the social emergency, (it is not) pensions, it is purchasing power, employment, the evolution work and the relationship to work”.

“There will be no discussion during the summer with the CFDT” on pensions, he warned, believing that “there is not such an urgency that a measure would be needed at the September 1st”.

Recalling that the Minister of the Economy receives the employers’ organizations on Monday afternoon, the boss of the first French union “invited” Bruno Le Maire to also bring together the unions.

“We want a real social conference on the issue of purchasing power and wages,” he said.