After only two years of experiments in 18 territories, France Travail will register and gradually support 1.2 million RSA beneficiaries; by ensuring that they dedicate 15 to 20 hours per week to their project or activity. A hasty change of scale, deplores Jean-Louis Walter. The national mediator of France Travail encourages all stakeholders to show great flexibility towards our fellow citizens who are far from employment, so as not to increase their distress.
Marianne : Since 1is January, the national employment service is supposed to register 1.2 million RSA beneficiaries; then, in agreement with the departments, support them on three types of courses, depending on their social difficulties. All while ensuring, unless exempted, that they devote 15 to 20 hours per week to getting closer to employment. Is France Travail really ready to deploy this “full employment” law?
Jean-Louis Walter : France Travail has actively prepared to register 1.2 million beneficiaries for the RSA, then to support them with the departments, local missions and their service providers. Its IT system will be deployed: from January letters will be sent, then beneficiaries will be contacted directly by telephone. And very sincerely, I hope that in 2025 my mediation will not be overwhelmed by requests for intervention from RSA beneficiaries in distress…
However, this support for RSA recipients by France Travail is becoming widespread in a difficult climate! First, because France Travail still does not know what its financial and human resources will be in 2025. Will the executive want, as in 2024, to eliminate hundreds of positions in a new budget law? It would be very destabilizing, as its general director Thibaut Guilluy indicated.
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Then, France Travail and the departments will begin to contact our fellow citizens furthest from employment, without having been able to study the decrees implementing the “full employment” law, since these have not yet been published. Finally and above all, all these players and their service providers must change scale, without having had time to collectively learn lessons from the experiments they have carried out since the end of 2022 in 18 territories.
However, the evaluation report of these experiments points to concrete implementation difficulties: starting with the poor communication of the different information systems of the actors responsible for processing the files of beneficiaries receiving the RSA. A handicap that the use of artificial intelligence will not be enough to overcome.
A mediator who enjoys working in the field, you visited the France Travail telephone platforms to listen to the difficulties of our fellow citizens who are far from employment. What did you learn about them?
Often, beneficiaries who have been surviving on an RSA for years are not aware of the latest government announcements. they are therefore surprised to be called by France Travail. This astonishment overcome, they are rather happy that we are interested in them. Many of them, being unfamiliar with dematerialized exchanges, must then seek help, for example from the granddaughter who sets up her computer on the kitchen table.
When our agents question them further about their medical, banking and housing problems which are obstacles to returning to work, they often discover that these beneficiaries have kilos of letters at home which they no longer open. Some are even bedridden, without ever having applied for a disability allowance! In this general discussion, an hour quickly passed: by listening to them, we understand that these forgotten people, too often considered by certain departments as a cost, need contact, including physical contact, to put together projects.
READ ALSO: Working to receive the RSA: but actually, what will the poor do?
Also, before even considering suspending their RSA – if they do not devote 15 to 20 hours per week to the procedures provided for in the employment contract that they will sign with France Travail, I suggest that we take it easy. . And not to sanction them, at least not before the summer of 2025. If we want to build a major employment service, in a worrying economic environment, this flexibility is necessary! This one-semester period will in fact be very useful: it will notably allow two-thirds of the departments which do not yet have mediation to do so, in order to investigate the complaints of beneficiaries who consider that their RSA has been unduly suspended. or dog-eared.
Deprived of additional resources, can France Travail take care of 1.2 million citizens far from employment, without this flagship objective degrading the monitoring of other categories of unemployed people?
It is indeed a risk, when we reform with constant means. For the record, in 1992, when Martine Aubry successfully launched a major plan aimed at putting 500,000 long-term unemployed back into employment, this mobilization was to the detriment of others registered with ANPE, the public service of the 'era. But in 2025, there will be other boomerang effects to watch out for.
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Indeed, with the entry into force of the “full employment” law, it is now the departmental employment committees, in which elected officials, the prefect, and drowned in the France Travail crowd sit, which will set in detail the rules of local integration policies. RSA recipients will therefore be treated differently, depending on their place of residence, which could fuel inequalities. Especially since the departments which until now managed the RSA as an administrative benefit will now seek to reduce their expenses, in particular by ensuring that their beneficiaries receive all the allowances to which they are entitled, paid by other communities or by the State. But of course, this is all wrapped up in good intentions…
