“An employee who abandons his position has access to more favorable compensation conditions than an employee who resigns”, underlined the Minister.
The Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, said on Tuesday that he was open to tightening access to unemployment compensation in the case of “a pole abandonwhen an employee no longer comes to work without justification and ends up being fired by his employer.
«There is a loophole: an employee who abandons his position has access to more favorable compensation conditions than an employee who resigns“, noted the Minister before the Social Affairs Committee of the Assembly which examines his draft law on unemployment insurance. “We are open to these conditions being aligned“, he added, while an LR amendment was tabled in this direction, while ensuring “that employees who leave their job for safety reasons are not penalized».
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“An increasingly palpable phenomenon”
Unemployment insurance is in principle reserved for people who are involuntarily deprived of employment. For resigners, there are some limited exceptions. Among them, the fact of following a spouse concerned 14,000 cases in 2021 according to Unédic. Since 2019, the possibility is also open once every 5 years to those who have a professional project (12,000 cases in 2021). But a dismissal for abandonment of post constitutes a dismissal for fault and does not deprive the dismissed of his right to benefit from unemployment insurance, although the abandonment of post is “voluntary».
However, if he is dismissed for serious misconduct, the employee will not receive any severance pay or compensation for notice and paid leave. There are no statistics on these job abandonments but the LR deputies assure in their amendment that “this is an increasingly palpable phenomenon in professional circles».
«The employee who wants to leave his job (…) to withdraw from the labor market while having the objective of maintaining an income will not resign but simply will not return to work so that the employer, tired of the fight, proceeds on his dismissal“, they advance. “While the resigner is bound by a notice which allows the employer to organize himself, the phantom employee, by abandoning his position overnight, disrupts the smooth running of the company.“, they add.
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To fight against recruitment tensions, Mr. Dussopt, on the other hand, was more reserved on the desire of certain deputies to harden access to unemployment for a CDD refusing a CDI. The Minister recalled that when an employee refuses a CDI offered under the same conditions as his CDD, then the precariousness bonus of 10% is not due by the employer, a provision unknown according to him.
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