In September 2012 President François Hollande first used the famous expression that soon turned into an economic promise. The French government, he said, had to “reverse the unemployment trend”, later pledging that this would be achieved by the end of 2013. Today, nearly two years later, the government is staging its third 'social conference' bringing together unions, employers and ministers to back President Hollande’s much-heralded 40-billion-euro 'Responsibility Pact' which aims to cut employment costs for businesses in the hope that they will in return create new jobs. But meanwhile unemployment continues to rise. The total has now passed the symbolic threshold of five million if one includes what is known in France as categories A, B and C of the unemployed, which includes people looking for jobs who have worked for part of the previous month.
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This rise is nothing new. The jobless total has continued an upward trend throughout the last decade, despite a brief downturn between 2005 and 2008. The surge in unemployment seen over the last six years started after the financial crisis that hit in the autumn of 2008, triggered by the sub-prime lending crisis.
Over and above the five million figure itself, there is also concern over long-term unemployment. Figures from the Direction de l'Animation de la Recherche, des Études et des Statistiques (DARES), the research body attached to the ministry of employment, show that on average people are remaining jobless for longer periods. In May 2012, when François Hollande became president, the average length of time that a person signed on at the official employment centre Pôle Emploi was 467 days. In May 2014 that figure was 524 days, or around 17 months. The number of people classified as long-term unemployed – people signed on at Pôle Emploi for a year or more – has now reached 2.29 million, just under half of the overall figure.
Workers over the age of 50 are those most likely to be out of work for long periods. The average length of time a person in this category is signed on at Pôle Emploi is 668 days, just two months short of two years. Long-term unemployment among people over 50 has gone up by around 40% since May 2012. In total nearly 1.1 million people over 50 are today looking for work. This growing problem led employment minister François Rebsamen to announce on June 23rd a targeted plan to get older people back into the workplace. This plan is a variation of the so-called the 'contracts for the future' aimed at unemployed young people; it will involve state aid of up to 6,000 euros for firms that hire someone over 57.
Growing inequality
“The fight against [financial] precarity is a permanent battle,” the former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on October 17th, 2013, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The latest official figures available on household income and assets are those published by the statistics agency INSEE on July 2nd, 2014. These are based on tax returns and social security figures from 2011 so they are three years old. However, the latest unemployment figures suggest there is unlikely to have been much improvement in household finances in the last three years.
These figures show that the number of French people who have fallen below the poverty line, defined as an income of 977 euros a month, has continued to rise and is now approaching ten million – it was 8.8 million in 2011.
A second finding is that the gap between the well-off and the poorest in society is growing. In particular the income of the very highest earners – the top 0.01% - has increased significantly. In cash terms this group earned at least 567,000 euros in 2004, a figure which rose to 810,7000 euros by 2011 – a jump of 43%. At the other end of the spectrum the poorest 10% of French people saw only a marginal increase in their income over the same period. In 2005 they earned a maximum of 13,020 euros a year, while in 2011 this figure was 13,070 – an increase of just 50 euros.
Finally, the INSEE figures show that the number of people living in hardship is rising each year. In March 2014 nearly 2.3 million household received income from the top-up benefit the Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA). This welfare payment was introduced in 2009 to replace the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion and the Allocation de Parent Isolé benefits. The monthly RSA payment is 499 euros for a single person without work. The plan to fight poverty unveiled in December 2012 by prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault's government made provision for a 10% increase in this benefit over five years. Under Ayrault's successor Manuel Valls this time frame was at one time discarded, but the next rise in RSA will be now implemented on September 1st, 2014. Since 2012 the number of people receiving RSA has grown by 7.8%, illustrating the rise in poverty and financial hardship in society.
Financial hardship also affects people in regular employment, in particular women. More than 30% of female employees work part-time, defined as between 24 and 35 hours a week. In the first half of 2014 some 80% of all part-time workers were women.
Poorest regions hit hardest by unemployment
The poorest regions in France are also those that have the highest unemployment rate. According to figures from INSEE, the Languedoc-Roussillon region in the south has the highest jobless rate of 13.9% and the highest levels of poverty – 19.6% of the population live below the poverty line – in mainland France. Just behind it is the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in northern France where the unemployment rate is 13%.
The map below shows the unemployment rates for the regions of mainland France; click on a region to see the figure. The regions with the darkest colours are those with the highest jobless rates.
When Arnaud Montebourg – now economy minister - was named as minister for industrial recovery in May 2012, his department was, he said, going to oversee the “regaining of industrial jobs”. Two years on and the industrial situation is catastrophic. More than 75,000 industrial jobs have been lost since the second quarter of 2012, to which can be added the net loss of 170,000 jobs in the commercial sector (excluding farming). In the last ten years the regions worst hit by the destruction of jobs are, as one might expect, the former industrial heartlands of Lorraine in the north-east of France and Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Rural regions, too, have experienced a serious loss of jobs, with Champagne-Ardenne, Picardie, Franche-Comté and Upper and Lower Normandy heading the list.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter