“French Employment Services Examined for Overhaul: Lessons from Other Countries”

This is one of the expertise on which the High Commissioner for Employment Thibaut Guilluy relied for his prefiguration report on France travail, the project to overhaul the employment and integration service. The draft bill has begun to be submitted to the social partners, for application by 2027.

The general inspection of social affairs and that of finance (IGAS and IGF) looked at five foreign public employment services: German, Catalan, Danish, Flemish and Swedish. Objective: “to identify good practices that can inspire the French public employment service”. They drew four main observations.

A more directive accompaniment

First observation: in the countries studied, “the organization of public employment services is less fragmented than the French organization” with a single support desk for the unemployed, with one exception. In Germany, there are two but with “very well defined perimeters” between management of the unemployment insurance scheme and management of the assistance scheme.

With the exception of Catalonia, the support for the unemployed is also more directive elsewhere than in France, with a “strategy geared towards the rapid resumption of employment”. In France, it is a question of supporting the jobseeker’s project, whether it “allows them to quickly lead to a job or not”, an approach deemed “less relevant today in view of the tensions on certain professions”.

More human and financial resources

The third observation is that, with the exception of Catalonia, human and financial support resources are lower in France. Finally, there is a difficulty shared by all, that of “ensuring the integration of all those furthest from employment”. But outside of France, the subsidized employment policy is preserved.

This leads the IGAS and the IGF to define four priorities. In addition to the “definition of a contractual framework where each actor commits to quantified and verifiable objectives”, the mission recommends better measuring the distance to employment, in particular of the beneficiaries of the RSA and the ASS (the solidarity unemployment allowance) “and to adapt their course accordingly”.

Measuring remoteness from employment

It also recommends “setting realistic employment objectives that evolve over time and adopting a more directive approach by linking funded training to an employment target”. On the particularly sensitive subject of the control of job seekers, it recommends “adopting a more progressive grid of sanctions” than the current one, which could then be “applied more systematically”. Finally, the report suggests experimenting “at the local level” with “mixed teams specializing in companies and job seekers, particularly in sectors in tension”.