Macron begins work on changing labour laws to tackle joblessness
Trade unions fear move will reduce protection for workers
President Emmanuel Macron’s government has launched an effort to redesign French labour rules, one of the most important and divisive promises of his presidency.
Labour minister Muriel Penicaud said yesterday that the government is “moving the rules of the game” in hopes of tackling unemployment, which is hovering around the 10 per cent mark.
A draft labour law was presented at a Cabinet meeting yesterday and unions fear it strips away hard-earned worker protections.
The government proposes to cap the financial penalty for companies sued for firing employees, and to allow businesses more flexibility to define internal working rules.
The government also wants to use a special procedure to pass the measures quickly this summer without extended debate in parliament.
Ms Penicaud, a former director of human resources for food products multinational Danone, said the reform is “expected by the French, they gave a clear signal of need for change” by electing Mr Macron, who is a pro-free market centrist.
She insisted the bill could be amended and the government is not signing itself a “blank cheque”. A total of 48 meetings with workers’ unions and employers’ organisations are scheduled to discuss the reform, she stressed.
The details of the reform are to be presented at the end of August.
Following the Cabinet meeting, government spokesman Christophe Castaner stressed the importance of the labour reform as part of a series of measures that will aim at lowering the unemployment rate to 7 per cent at the end of Mr Macron’s term in 2022.
Mr Castaner recently warned unions against seeking to block the reforms.
He said: “You don’t have the right to impede France when you don’t agree with suchand-such a measure, especially when it was at the heart of Emmanuel Macron’s presidential agenda.”
Mr Macron’s aides have made it clear they want the law passed as early as July so it can come into force this autumn.
The CGT union called for a national day of protests and strikes against the labour reform on 12 September.
The secretary general of France’s main employee union, the CFDT, Laurent Berger, said he is in a “phase of consultation” with the government.
“There’s no blind trust or widespread distrust,” he said.
Previous attempts to loosen France’s labour rules under Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, drew tens of thousands of people on to the streets for months.
Meanwhile, the white house announced yesterday that Donald Trump plans to celebrate Bastille Day in France.
Mr Trump has accepted Mr Macron’s invitation to help celebrate France’s national holiday on 14 July.
Mr Macron invited Mr Trump to visit when they met for the first time at a Nato summit in Brussels in late May. On Tuesday, the French president extended the invitation again when he and Mr Trump spoke by telephone.
The holiday commemorates the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, an event that marked a turning point in the French Revolution.
The occasion will also be used to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the US entry into the First World War, Mr Macron’s office said. American soldiers will walk alongside French soldiers during the traditional Bastille Day military parade down Paris’ Champs-elysees avenue.
Separately on 14 July, Mr Macron plans to travel to Nice to mark a more sombre occasion: the truck attack that day in 2016 that killed 86 people and injured hundreds in the resort town in the south of France. It was unclear whether Mr Trump would join Mr Macron in Nice.