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Fixing France's broken social model? An assessment of employment and labour market policy under the Sarkozy presidency

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Abstract

Taking as its starting point the programme and campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election of 2007 around the ‘value of work’, this article reviews and assesses the main reforms undertaken during the period of his presidency. It focuses on the reform of working time regulationsg through tax exoneration for overtime hours, minimum income benefit (the introduction of the Revenu de solidarité active), moves to reform labour contracts, measures to help combat youth unemployment and pension reform. The article highlights inconsistencies between the political discourse of structural reform and a practice of incrementalism caused by ideological ambiguities, mismatch between policy design and economic conditions, and the reality of policymaking in a complex and fragmented polity.

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Notes

  1. The speech, made in 8 December 2006 in Charleville–Mézière, in an industrial town in Northern France hit by unemployment, explicitly linked ‘la valeur travail’ with an attack on welfare dependency, a theme that was later taken up in the run-up to the 2012 elections by the president and by his (then European affairs) Minister Laurent Wauquiez.

  2. In the standard TNS Sofres (2012) time-series survey, 46 per cent cited employment as their main concern in May 2012 (first response given; 78 per cent of all responses), up from 43 per cent a year earlier, five times more than the next highest response. In another survey, conducted between the two rounds of the legislative elections, 32 per cent of voters cited unemployment as their main priority, over twice as many as those citing the next highest priority, public debt (YouGov, 2012).

  3. The thinktank Terra Nova, headed by the Socialist Party's Henri Emmanuelli, produced a list of ‘broken promises’, which was widely reproduced in the press and in blogs: See, for example, Hebert, D. Le quinquennat de Nicolas Sarkozy en 5 chiffres, Le Nouvel Observateur, 15 February 2012.

  4. In this, the Sarkozy administration followed a route already opened by the previous government, which had raised the overtime ceiling and allowed the use of accumulated time credits: See Dimitrakopoulos (2012).

  5. A January 2012 poll of employers found them divided over the measure, with 60 per cent in favour (29 per cent strongly in favour) and 40 per cent against. A majority of these employers wanted instead outright repeal of the 35-hour-week law, with 28 per cent against this suggestion. See Journal des Entreprises/TMO Régions (2012).

  6. A French specificity is that unemployment benefit is managed jointly by the employers and trade unions, and Pôle Emploi (funded two-thirds from unemployment benefits, and one-third by the state) houses a joint structure that retains social partner management of benefits. This means that reform of the rules governing access to benefits (conditionality) depends on negotiations between employers and trade unions.

  7. See, for example, Cevipof's regular Baromètre de la confiance politique, which by January 2011 showed only higher-income pensioners retaining confidence in the executive, despite a general bias to the right of older generations.

  8. See, for example, the above-cited poll of employers (Journal des Entreprises/TMO Régions, 2012) in which only 7 per cent attributed France's problems to economic crisis, 39 per cent to decisions taken by president Sarkozy and 54 per cent to a mixture of the two.

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Milner, S. Fixing France's broken social model? An assessment of employment and labour market policy under the Sarkozy presidency. Fr Polit 10, 290–305 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2012.13

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