RSA beneficiaries will all be registered with France Travail from January 2025

From January, all beneficiaries of Active Solidarity Income (RSA) will be registered with France Travail (compared to 40% today) and will have to subscribe to a “engagement contract” specifying social and professional integration objectives. With this reform, 1.2 million additional people will be automatically registered as job seekers, including 200,000 young people in the integration process in the local missions of the departments.

These new job seekers will first be placed in a “waiting category” newly created named G, the time to be distributed into one of the categories from A to F at the end of their orientation interview, category F also being new and reserved for people “on a social integration journey”according to France Travail and the Ministries of Labor and Solidarity.

Tight support

A controversial provision: as part of their employment contract, RSA beneficiaries may be required to have 15 to 20 hours of weekly activities, including interviews, training, internships or immersions in a company. This contract will be personalized and “these 15 hours are not a condition for the granting of an allowance, it is an element within the employment contract co-constructed between the person and the referring organization”according to the same sources.

L’“renovated support” of beneficiaries has already concerned more than 70,000 people in 49 departments in 2024. It is carried out by France Travail but also, for those who are furthest from employment, by the departments, which pay the RSA and have the power to sanction non-compliant beneficiaries. Some 54% of beneficiaries who have benefited from enhanced support from France Travail over the last twelve months have held a job at some point, half of them in long-term employment.

But the final evaluation report of the experiment published in November by the Ministry of Labor notes that the objective of 15 to 20 hours of activity “stimulates reflections and debates among professionals and beneficiaries”. “The administrative constraint of traceability of 15-20 hours is difficult to justify and can affect the relationship of trust with beneficiaries, or in certain cases even lead to renouncing the RSA. In practice, the achievement of this objective is uneven, more accessible for beneficiaries close to employment”points to the evaluation.