“You have to do it. The president of Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, clearly reaffirms this Wednesday his support for a pension reform and invited the government to initiate consultations in the fall.
“We must reform unemployment insurance”, which is on the program of the Council of Ministers this Wednesday, he argued on France 2. “As soon as it has been completed, that is to say in the fall, it will be necessary to initiate consultations on retirement, ”insisted the leader of the first employers’ organization on France 2.
“We are a country which has strong social protections, which must invest in schools, the army, health… The only way to finance (these investments), it is the quantity of work”, declared Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, who “assumes” a “big disagreement” with the unions, opposed to the pension reform.
If the Mouvement des entreprises de France (Medef) has long defended a pension reform, the timetable for its implementation is less obvious. Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux himself judged at the end of August, on France Inter, that such a project is “not what should be done on September 1”.
Massive strikes at the end of 2019
In government, the Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, regularly repeats his desire to bring the reform into force in the summer of 2023, but the subject was absent from the government seminar last week. However, “we want to move forward” assured the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, at the beginning of September.
The government put on the table in 2019 a first reform project, which led to massive strikes and a paralysis of public transport. After two years marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the subject came back into the news thanks to the presidential campaign.
Apart from pensions, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux judged “not impossible” the government’s objective of reducing companies’ energy consumption by 10% in two years. The “chemicals” sector has already reduced its consumption since the beginning of the year by 8%,” he said.
The boss of Medef was also much more reserved on the virtues of teleworking in terms of energy sobriety. “I don’t believe that working from home saves money, contrary to popular belief,” he said. “The complete energy balances of teleworking are not at all obvious. »