Posted Dec 27 2022 at 13:59Updated 27 Dec. 2022 at 16:52
Unemployment continues to decline. In November, the number of job seekers without activity – classified in category A – fell by nearly 66,000 in France to concern 3.026 million people, according to figures published by the Ministry of Labor on Tuesday.
After the small troughs of spring and summer, it is a third strong monthly drop in a row which brings the decline in the workforce of this category, the most scrutinized, to nearly 160,000 since the end of August, and to nearly 285,000 since January. If we add categories B (less than 78 hours worked in the month) and C (more than 79 hours), the 5.4 million mark was crossed slightly downwards, for the first time since August 2014 It should be noted that one out of two registrants in category C worked full time.
Another threshold crossed, the share of job seekers registered for more than a year in metropolitan France came out just below 45% at the end of November, for the first time in five years. Support for these long-term job seekers was the subject of a plan launched in the fall of 2021 by Jean Castex, recently supplemented by the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt.
Countercyclicality
The publication of these figures closely follows that of the so-called “countercyclicality” decree taken within the framework of the law on “emergency measures relating to the functioning of the labor market with a view to full employment”. This decree provides that the duration of compensation will be reduced by a quarter compared to the current situation for new unemployed from 1is february.
To the chagrin of the unions, the government has planned to go a step further: the number of months of cover will drop by 40% if the unemployment rate as defined by the ILO falls below the 6% mark of the active population, which which is highly unlikely before 2024. As a reminder, it was 7.3% in the third quarter.
The government has set itself the goal of achieving full employment by the end of the five-year term, which means gaining another around 2 percentage points on the unemployment rate. For this, it relies on the reorganization of all the actors who help the unemployed to find a job or the companies to recruit, Pôle emploi, local missions, regions and other associations. Baptized France Travail, the project gave rise to a first milestone in mid-December with the selection of around twenty departments to help beneficiaries of the RSA.