In 2023, the government has decided that workers will stay in their jobs longer by raising the retirement age. Starting in 2025, they could be asked to work seven hours of overtime a year. And this, without remuneration. This is, in any case, the wish of the Republican senators and the centrist parliamentary group of the Union, the majority in the Luxembourg Palace, who approved, on Wednesday, November 20, an amendment in this regard, during the examination of the project. Social Security Financing Law. His initiative does not come out of nowhere: for several weeks, the debate on increasing the working day has been relaunched, particularly by right-wing and center-right figures, but also by supporters of Emmanuel Macron.
Gérald Darmanin contributed to reviving this old sea serpent that emerges, intermittently, on the French political scene. ” Can (…) definitively end thirty-five hours in the private sector and (…) spend thirty-six or thirty-seven hours in public, of course paid accordingly.”declared the Renaissance deputy of the North, in the columns of echoes since October 7. Within the government, the Minister of Economy, Antoine Armand, develops a relatively similar discourse, underlining the need to “work more”. His idea, also supported by other personalities – belonging to the Renaissance group in the National Assembly – consists of saying that to finance social protection or improve our public accounts it is necessary to increase activity, which will stimulate income from contributions and taxes.
This path has just been undertaken by the senatorial majority with a very specific objective: to provide new resources for old-age policies. The measure approved on Wednesday at the Luxembourg Palace is inspired by the “day of solidarity” created in 2004: it represented an increase in annual unpaid work time of seven hours, in exchange for a contribution equivalent to 0.3% of the payroll and paid. by businessmen to the National Solidarity Fund for Autonomy. In the provision approved in the Senate, “total freedom” It is up to the field actors to define “modalities of realization” of the tax, which would release 2.5 billion euros per year in favor of the “autonomy branch.”
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