2023-09-05 08:00:15
The President of the Republic’s proposal for a social agreement on low wages is excellent news. Because it is indeed salaries that are the keystone of the recognition of work and the ability to project oneself, whether for the daily budget, the perks that make up the little pleasures of life and, of course, the biggest projects – housing, children’s studies, car – which require a bank loan.
The minimum wage is intended to be an entry level into working life, not the remuneration of a full career. However, the problem with low wages is that they assimilate to a “sticky floor” – in the words of the Terra Nova think tank in 2022 – where workers find themselves stuck for years, if not decades. The reality is above all that the “minimum wage” goes against the values of effort, merit and recognition so essential to our social and republican contract. It is then a machine to fuel resentment and the vote for the extreme right.
The government’s lawsuit for inaction is unfair because the lowest paid workers have been supported in recent years: energy tariff shields, “Macron bonus”, revaluation of small civil service salaries, tax exemption for overtime or even agreement on the value added to facilitate employees’ access to profit-sharing and participation in SMEs – to name just a few examples.
Also read the forum: Article reserved for our subscribers “Who can still rejoice in job creation if it leads to economic insecurity and the impossibility of surviving? »
But today, often, only the minimum wage focuses the attention of public debate and political proposals. And that’s a shame. First, because a general increase in the minimum wage does not solve the problem of part-time work, which is the greatest factor of poverty, and the associated small pensions, in particular for women. Then, because the experience in companies with more than ten employees has shown that, for a comparable increase, the revaluation of the wage grids of the branches was more effective than the revaluation of the minimum wage in raising wages higher and more frequently.
Finally, for low-income workers, the minimum wage floor is often also a ceiling. Between conventional minima lower than the minimum wage and settling of branch salary grids, it takes years, sometimes decades, for a worker to leave this “low-wage trap”, despite the skills and experience acquired. This is the result of the lasting stalemate in social dialogue in certain branches, where the mandatory annual negotiations [NAO] do not take place frequently or regularly enough are not successful. These NAOs allowed wage increases of 4.6% in 2023 on a national average, according to a study by the Alpha group, but today nearly 10% of the branches still have conventional minima below the minimum wage.
You have 53.18% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
#issue #wages #remuneration