A few days before the first round of the legislative elections, the leader of La France insoumise (LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, continues to attack Emmanuel Macron’s record in the hope of rallying voters behind his alliance, the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes). Invited in the morning of France Inter, Tuesday, June 7, the unfortunate candidate for the presidential election estimated that “unemployment is masked by recourse to apprenticeship”.
While the journalist Léa Salamé, who questioned him, retorted that “unemployment has never been so low for fifteen years”Mr. Mélenchon got carried away:
“Madame Salamé, tell your listeners that unemployment has fallen because we are registering 900,000 new jobs which are in fact the contracts of young apprentices, who are apprentices, not hired workers! (…) Unemployment is at its highest level, real unemployment. »
“Madame Salamé, tell your listeners that unemployment has dropped because we are registering 900,000 new jobs which are… https://t.co/397JphpBEe
why is it overkill
As pointed out by M.me Salamé, the unemployment rate has never been so low in fifteen years, if we take the figures in the sense of International Labor Office (BIT), which remains the“benchmark indicator for analyzing changes in the labor market”, as noted by the Department of Labor.
In the first quarter, the unemployment rate remained almost stable (-0.1 point) at 7.3% of the active population in France, after having fallen by 0.6 point the previous quarter, according to data from the Institute National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). Since the arrival of Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace in the second quarter of 2017, the unemployment rate has fallen by 2.2 points. “This is its lowest level since the beginning of 2008, if we exclude the one-off drop in trompe-l’oeil in the spring of 2020, during the first confinement”specifies the INSEE.
But for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, this drop in the unemployment rate is solely due to the increase in apprenticeship contracts, strongly driven by exceptional aid put in place since the health crisis.
The number of apprenticeship contracts indeed exploded during Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term. According to the Department of Animation, Research, Studies and Statistics (Dares) of the Ministry of Labor, 731,000 new apprenticeship contracts in the private and public sector were signed in 2021, compared to 289,000 in 2016.
This sharp increase can be explained by various reforms: financial aid for apprentices, increased support for hiring and measures aimed at simplifying the use of apprenticeships for employers. The very expensive “1 young person, 1 solution” plan, set up in the midst of a health crisis, in July 2020, provides in particular for the payment of exceptional aid (between 5,000 and 8,000 euros) to employers who recruit an apprentice.
“Never in France have we helped a job at such a levelanalyzes Bruno Coquet, associate researcher at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions (OFCE) and author of a note on the subject. Exceptional aid makes it possible to cover 100% of the salary of an apprentice under the age of 25 for the first year. » This aid, planned until June, will be extended “at least until the end of the year”announced at the end of May, the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt.
A link difficult to estimate
Is this undeniable increase in the number of apprentices enough to explain the entire drop in unemployment? “It is very complicated to establish this link. It exists, but we don’t know how to quantify it at this stage.”comments Bruno Coquet, while assuring without hesitation that “to say like Jean-Luc Mélenchon that all of today’s apprentices were unemployed yesterday is false”.
In a note on the situation published in March, INSEE also explains that a majority of those entering apprenticeships were not unemployed, but students before the start of their contract:
“According to data from Dares, in 2020, 53.9% of new apprentices were studying before the start of the contract and only 28.1% were already in apprenticeship or job seekers. It can therefore be estimated that a large proportion of the beneficiaries of these contracts move from inactivity to employment. »
This means that the sharp increase in the number of work-study contracts has a significant effect on the increase in the activity and employment rate of young people, more than on unemployment. Between the end of 2015 and the end of 2021, the youth employment rate thus increased by 5.3 points, of which 2.9 points are attributed to work-study contracts.
To count all work-study contracts, it is also necessary to include professionalization contracts. Since the 2018 apprenticeship reform, which extended the maximum entry age from 25 to 29, professionalization contracts have fallen significantly between 2019 and 2020, before rising again in 2021. Combined, the two types of contracts have almost doubled in five years, going from 484,700 in 2016 to 852,300 in 2021. » work-study students of around 900,000 at the end of 2021.
Finally, we can note that unemployment among 15-24 year olds had started to fall in 2016, even before the apprenticeship reform, exceptional aid and the explosion in the number of work-study students.
If the impressive apprenticeship figures cannot fully explain the drop in unemployment, as Mr. Mélenchon suggests, the scheduled end of exceptional aid at the end of 2022 risks drastically reducing the number of apprenticeship contracts, therefore the youth employment rate.
For Bruno Coquet, this aid, which was legitimate during the height of the crisis, has now become “unnecessary and too expensive” and have been “Massively used to integrate young people who encounter few or no problems into employment”, i.e. graduates with bac + 2 or higher. On the contrary, they were “no effect on the young people most in difficulty when entering the labor market”.