No collapse yet on the job market, but a “swan song”? The number of unemployed people looking for work (category A) remained almost stable in the third quarter (+0.2%), still close to the symbolic threshold of three million unemployed. According to data published on Friday by the Ministry of Labour, the number of unemployed registered with France Travail amounts to 3.021 million in France (excluding Mayotte), which is 5,200 more registered than in the previous quarter.
Including reduced activity (categories B and C), the number of people looking for work amounts to 5.4 million. It increased 0.2% from the previous quarter and 0.8% year-over-year. The last time the number of category A unemployed fell below 3 million dates back to the third quarter of 2011 (2,992 million), 13 years ago.
By age group, the number of people looking for work in category A decreases by 0.9% for those under 25 (+0.9% over one year), increases by 0.1% for those aged 25 to 49 (-0.2% over one year) and 0.8% for those aged 50 or over (+0.3% over one year).
“A fairly notable worsening, little by little, of the job market”
For Mathieu Plane, economist at the Ofce (French Observatory of the Economic Situation), “we are rather in stable unemployment”, which has been observed for “a good year”. But, he told AFP, it’s a bit of a “swan song” because we are still seeing “quite a noticeable deterioration, little by little, in the labor market.” He predicts “a progressive adjustment” with “job destruction”, linked to several factors including “budget adjustment”, weak growth or even “less generous employment policies”. “We are on the plateau, but we shouldn’t stay there,” believes the economist.
The same pessimism is expressed by Nathalie Chusseau, an economist at the University of Lille, who notes “an economic indicator that does not promise anything good” and judges that “we are only at the beginning”. He underlines that “the increase is still concentrated on people aged 50 and over”, which is linked “to the issue of raising the retirement age”, with as a corollary the issue of maintaining the employment of the elderly. He also notes the increase in admissions to France Travail due to economic layoffs (+ 5.7%), estimating that this corroborates “environmental pessimism”, especially with regard to industry where some sectors “are particularly suffering”, like the automotive one.
More than this increase in entries due to dismissal, Mathieu Plane considers the drop in exits from France Travail due to declared resumption of work (people leaving the statistics because they have found a job) to be “worrying”. «There is a decline in the last quarter which is marked» (-9.4%), he notes, but above all «it is the lowest point since 2014, excluding the Covid shock». “This shows that we have a small problem in terms of the dynamism of the labor market and that we have a very strong slowdown in terms of employment,” continues the economist.
The goal of full employment maintained by the government
Economists expect an increase in the unemployment rate measured by INSEE, used for international comparisons. In the second quarter it was 7.3%. In the latest economic report in October, the National Institute of Statistics forecast a “slight” increase which should have stood at 7.5% at the end of the year. The UFC also indicated last week that it expects an increase to 7.5% at the end of 2024 and as high as 8% a year later.
However, the government has not abandoned the full employment goal that head of state Emmanuel Macron hopes to achieve in 2027. It is defined by a “frictional” unemployment rate, estimated only for people between two jobs or entering in the labor market about 5%. In a press release, the CGT sees the increase in job seekers this quarter as “the clear failure” of Emmanuel Macron.
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