Posted 7 Feb. 2023 at 6:00 am
He is number 2… and perhaps soon number 1 of Medef, of which Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux is to leave the presidency in July. Suffice to say that the word of Patrick Martin is not insignificant. And in the interview he gave this Monday to the daily newspapers of the Ebra Group, the vice-president of the Mouvement des entreprises de France severely judges the conduct of the pension reform by the government.
On the merits, the employer leader does not express any disagreement. On the contrary, even, the reform is for him essential to “increase the “productive capacity” of the country, the number of people in employment” and “to ensure the financial balance of the system”.
A “badly born” baby
But “the baby was born badly” and “we can understand a form of distrust of public opinion”, believes Patrick Martin. The boss of Martin Belaysoud Expansion judges that the reform “has probably not been sufficiently presented”, returning to “the waltz-hesitation between systemic or parametric reform”, “the wanderings on its objectives”, but also the congress of the CFDT which “blocked [é] any room for discussion” and the “one-upmanship”, the “role-playing” provoked by “the current parliamentary political panorama”.
One-upmanship which leads to “measures added at the request of parties or unions” which compromise the objective of the reform to ensure “an essential and lasting balance of the regime”.
Refusing that the result of the senior index “can lead to sanctions because it is impossible to establish standards”, the vice-president of Medef is as suspicious of the issue of quality of life at work as the government opened with the foundations of labour. He believes that the 35 hours have forced French companies to gain in productivity. He also calls for beware of “general measures that do not take into account the situation”.
Seniors: “impossible to establish standards”
Finally, on the sharing of value, on which a final negotiation session must take place with the unions next Friday, Patrick Martin considers that we are “still far from the goal”, in particular because of the government’s desire to impose new obligations on companies with fewer than 50 employees. But he points to “a wish to succeed on both sides”. It also alerts, in the event of an agreement, to the respect that the public authorities will have to have.