De facto reduction in the duration of compensation, modified rules for seniors, new rules if the unemployment rate falls to 6.5%… We explain the reform which will come into force on December 1st.
The Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, officially detailed in the Tribune Sunday, this Saturday evening, the content of its new unemployment insurance reform, which will be implemented by decree. These measures will come into force from December 1, by a decree which must be published on July 1.
More difficult access conditions, shortened compensation period
The current rules: Today, if you are under 53 years old, you must have worked 6 months in the last 24 months to qualify for unemployment insurance. Depending on the amount of work accomplished, the duration of compensation can range from 6 to 18 months.
What changes: You will now need to have worked at least 8 months in the last 20 months. Mechanical consequence: the work period taken into account cannot exceed 20 months. Also, due to the application of a coefficient of 0.75 when calculating the duration of compensation, this duration will be capped at 75% of 20 months, or 15 months.
Modified rules for “seniors”
The current rules: Today, it is possible to benefit from longer compensation if you are aged 53 or over. At ages 53 and 54, you can receive unemployment for 22.5 months. From the age of 55, you can receive it for 27 months.
In addition, once you have reached the legal retirement age, you can, under certain conditions, continue to receive your allowance until you reach the full retirement age.
What changes: In order to follow the shift in the legal retirement age, introduced by the 2023 reform, the age from which it will be possible to benefit from extended compensation will also change. Gabriel Attal no longer mentions the first level, which seems destined to disappear. You will therefore have to be over 57 years old to benefit from extended compensation.
In addition, according to the CGT and the CFE-CGC, the allowance paid between legal retirement age and full retirement age will now be limited to 57% of the Social Security ceiling, or 2,200 euros. per month.
An incentive to return to work for “seniors”
One of the obstacles to returning to employment for the most experienced employees is that it is very difficult, as the end of their career approaches, to find positions as well paid as their previous ones. To remedy this, the government is introducing a “senior employment bonus”. Concretely, an employee over the age of 57 who returns to a job that is less well paid than the previous one will receive a supplement from unemployment insurance allowing them to return to the same level of salary, for a period of one year.
A further reduction in the duration of compensation if the unemployment rate reaches 6.5%
The current rules: Today, the unemployment rate being less than 9%, a situation considered favorable, the government applies a coefficient of 0.75 to the duration of compensation which prevailed before its 2023 reform. Also, an employee who has worked two years and who would previously have been entitled to two years of unemployment (24 months), is now only entitled to one and a half years (18 months).
What might change: The government is introducing a new level in its system: if the unemployment rate reaches 6.5% (it is currently stable around 7.5%), the coefficient applied will be, according to several unions, 40%. To return to the example above, and taking into account the fact that the reference period will be reduced to 20 months, the duration of compensation would therefore no longer be 18 months like today, or 15 months like tomorrow, but 12 month.
A bonus-malus may be extended following consultation
The current rules: In order to combat the proliferation of short contracts, the government introduced a bonus-malus system in its 2021 reform: companies with more than eleven employees, spread across seven sectors of activity (transport, accommodation and catering, etc.), are affected by this mechanism which varies their unemployment contribution rate from 3 to 5.5% depending on their rate of use of fixed-term contracts, compared to the average rate in their sector.
What changes: Not much in the immediate future, since Gabriel Attal is awaiting the results of a “consultation” which will be carried out by the Minister of Labor, Catherine Vautrin, to see to what extent the system can be extended.
