At the moment, the unions are on several fronts. The day after the ninth day of national mobilization against pension reform throughout France, trade unions are mobilizing against another text, which came into force on February 1. Faced with the reform of unemployment insurance, which leads to a reduction in the duration of compensation for all new job seekers, several unions are seizing the Council of State.
The reform, which aims to modulate the conditions of unemployment insurance according to the situation of the labor market, provides for a 25% reduction in the duration of compensation for all jobseekers who have opened rights since February 1. . An unemployed person who would have been entitled, for example, to 12 months of compensation under the old system is now only entitled to nine months. A minimum floor of six months is preserved. The first impacts are therefore expected from August 1st.
Joint appeals by “all organizations”
In a press release, Unsa announced the first on Friday that “faced with a new unfair and brutal reform targeting job seekers”, the organization had “decided to seize the Council of State to obtain its cancellation”. Shortly after, the CGT, FSU and Solidaires announced that they were “attacking the Council of State’s unemployment insurance decree” published on January 26, specifying that “all the trade unions are jointly filing appeals”. According to the CGT, the CFDT and the CFTC must thus file a common appeal, other appeals must come from FO and the CFE-CGC.
“If the government persists in forcing its pension reform, we must not forget that it used the same strategy, despite the unanimous opposition of all the trade unions to reform unemployment insurance”, write the CGT , FSU and Solidaires, denouncing “an unfair, unjustified reform which breaks a little more the rights of those deprived of employment”.
The previous controversial reform, launched in 2019 and fully entering into force at the end of 2021, had been delayed for two years due to the Covid and the appeals of the unions before the Council of State.