ANALYSIS: Macron’s uphill battle to get the French to like their jobs

A number of structural reforms introduced by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017 have brought employment back to pre-2008 levels. However, the French are growing more and more disenfranchised with their jobs.

After months of political fights over a widely-rejected pensions reform, Macron is keen to move on.

In a speech in April, he announced the start of “a hundred days of appeasement”, involving the launch of a new “life-at-work pact” that would aim to “give meaning back to work, and improve working conditions”.

The pact is likely to translate into a series of legislative reforms, the first of which should see the light of day this summer.

And it is a pressing matter, as the French’s sense of fulfilment at work has never been so low.

“The recent pensions reform [which saw retirement age go up from 62 to 64] showed just how much people’s work aspirations didn’t fit their day-to-day anymore”, Lisa Thomas Darbois, chief economist at think tank Institut Montaigne, told EURACTIV.

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France’s embattled leader Emmanuel Macron has announced a new large-scale labour reform, hoping to revive his political standing with a new “life-at-work pact”  in the wake of a pension reform crisis that angered the nation and marred his second presidential mandate.

Lower unemployment levels at all costs

Macron came to power in 2017 on the ticket of improving employment.

Employment law will be “made simpler”, he promised, while unemployment benefits would go through a general overhaul so that they become a “universal right with new obligations for all”. The cost of work, he added, would be brought down to make recruitment easier.

Getting people in and out of jobs was both a financial and administrative burden for firms, Macron thought, so a little red-tape cutting wouldn’t do any harm, Bernard Martinot, former labour advisor to then-President Nicolas Sarkozy and a research fellow at the liberal Institut Montaigne think-tank told EURACTIV.

A large-scale unemployment reform, first instituted in 2018, limited companies’ recourse to short-term contracts, and made benefits conditional to an active job search.

In February 2023, the government tied unemployment benefits to national unemployment levels. Under the new changes, unemployed people would lose 25% of their monthly benefits if national unemployment levels drop below a 9% threshold – incentivising them to speed up job hunting.

At the same time, the government banned people from receiving benefits if they abandoned their posts without notice. Additionally, a worker with a fixed-term contract who refuses a permanent role twice in the same year would be refused benefits.

As part of this new “life-at-work pact”, a new reform is expected to be introduced to target those farther away from the labour market, whose only means to survive are a government monthly stipend of €600. Under the new law, receiving the money would be tied to the weekly completion of 15-20 hours of community service.

Martinot is of the view that “the government since Macron first got to power did a lot to ease access into the labour market”, for whom recent unemployment numbers are a consequence of undertaken structural reforms.

In fact, unemployment figures have never been so low ever since the 2008 crisis. While most of the 2010 decade saw 10% unemployment levels, things started to improve from 2017 onwards, down to 7% in March 2023 – a mere 0.1% away from pre-2008 crisis numbers.

However, unemployment figures have been falling all over the EU due to a robust fiscal response to the pandemic, which makes it difficult to identify the exact reason for the fall in unemployment.

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Train, train, train

As well  as making access to unemployment benefits more stringent, Macron has also pushed for continued up-skilling since 2017, in acceptance of the non-linearity of modern career paths.

Leaving a job to start a business, or retrain into a new sector, has been made easier, and the financial toll of such a decision mitigated through state funding.

This includes greater investments in giving young people easier access to a first job: under-25 unemployment levels in the country have historically been higher than the EU average. In March 2023, that figure stood at 17.9% in France, and 14.3% in the bloc.

On Thursday (4 May), Macron announced new measures to support vocational training, including higher salaries. A third of all 16-18 year-old pupils are currently enrolled in so-called ‘professional high-schools’.

“It’s not just a reform, it’s a cause of national importance,” the president said.

Ultimately, the “life-at-work” reform speaks to Macron’s intention to bring France to “full employment” by the end of his term in 2027 – which he claims would be attained with an unemployment rate of about 5%.

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Management culture problem

Yet the unemployment debate hides a more complex and harder-to-grasp issue: that of the value of work, and the sense of fulfilment it brings in workers’ lives.

“Employment and work are two different things,” Martinot said. The former – such as unemployment levels – is easily quantifiable, but working conditions, and people’s inner sense of purpose in the jobs that they do, is another matter altogether.

And “there really isn’t much the government can do” about getting people to like their jobs if there’s no paradigm shift in management happening at the same time.

Labour economist Malo Mofakhami told EURACTIV: “Work satisfaction is very low in France because the existing management culture in place doesn’t cater to the meaning of work.”

Europe-wide surveys show that France ranks high on the importance of work in life, though working conditions, paradoxically, rank very low.

“Possibilities to reconcile […] work and personal time are worse [in France] than in all other EU member states. Career perspective and trainings are structurally weaker” than in the rest of the EU bloc too, Malokhami wrote in an academic piece due to be published this week.

A radical overhaul of the management culture is critical, according to the experts, which should see greater autonomy given to workers, and flatter hierarchical structures. The proportion of French workers that considered work to be “very important” now sits at 24%, down from 60% in 1990, according to a Jean Jaures Foundation report.

Macron’s new “pact” looks to improve what’s hard to quantify: it introduces measures against professional fatigue and in favour of retaining elderly workers. It further aims to increase remuneration, and rekindle social dialogue after trade unions left the table of negotiations over pensions.

But this might fall short of anything of substance, experts warn, who fear that relying on the law misses the point. As Martinot summarised, “giving workers more leeway, and enhancing social dialogue, requires a culture change, not a legislative one”.

Pensions reform points to France's changing relationship to work

French people’s relationship to work is changing. While the government pushes for longer working lives, burnout rates are high. Opposing voices look to the four-day workweek as an alternative.

[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald]

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