Public authorities and companies do not give enough consideration to the fate of people harmed by their professional activity. This is one of the observations drawn up by the Court of Auditors in a report, published on Tuesday 20 December, about the policies “health prevention at work”. The high court even suggests that certain initiatives taken at the start of Emmanuel Macron’s first term were counterproductive. His assessments resonate with the pension reform currently carried out by the executive, one of the stated priorities being to strengthen actions in favor of employees who perform physically demanding jobs.
The authors of the report return to the changes decided in 2017 by the government of Edouard Philippe. He had redesigned the personal account for the prevention of hardship (C3P), created under the previous legislature and criticized by employers, who saw it as a ” Gaz factory “ impossible to operate. The device complained of aimed to measure the exposure of employees to ten “occupational risk factors” (extreme temperatures, night work, etc.) with a system of thresholds and points offering three possibilities, in the long term: retiring earlier, going part-time while retaining your salary, taking training.
Finally, the power in place, five years ago, had chosen to remove four factors from the mechanism (hand handling of loads, mechanical vibrations, etc.) and to remove the contribution relating to the device. Incidentally, the C3P had been renamed, becoming the C2P – on behalf of professional prevention – and erasing the word “difficulty”which Mr. Macron does not really love when he applies himself to work.
Ways to limit hardship
Assessment of these transformations? It is not famous, according to the Court of Auditors. In 2019, C2P had been used 4,598 times since its implementation, “which is very small”. The figure has increased over the recent period, approaching the 12,000 mark, according to data released in October by the Ministry of Labor. But the impact appears, at this stage, to be extremely weak.
Such a situation “can be explained by the necessarily progressive increase in load of the device”, acknowledge the authors of the report. However, they continue, the initial logic of the account was to“encourage employers to reduce the exposure of their employees to arduous work by imposing a specific contribution on them”. “However, this ambition was abandoned in 2017”, with the disappearance of the levy, ordered by the government of Edouard Philippe. Therefore, the C2P has no “no more virtue of prevention” et “is not up to the objectives assigned to it”.
You have 36.41% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.