Three years. This is the period that Muriel Pénicaud spent as Minister of Labor at the start of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term. Three intense years in which major reforms were carried out – Labor Code, apprenticeship, gender equality index – and in which the former minister takes a certain pride. In this book, she also looks back on her experience as HRD at Danone, as a director of Business France, but also as a simple civil servant, at the beginning of her professional career. A book in the form of an assessment but which also outlines avenues for the future transformations that await the world of work.
A successful law? “To consult, prepare a law, make it vote, it is 30 to 40% of the work. Then comes the time for implementation, everywhere in the field. Here too, the business experience speaks: defining a strategy is a small part of the manager’s role. The most difficult is to transform the test, to succeed in the implementation by ‘getting on’ the teams until the results are obtained. In politics, this means that a law is only successful if and when it has a positive impact on the real life of fellow citizens and when a significant part of public opinion sees it as a real step forward. “
Culture administrative. “Trusting a priori, then controlling a posteriori is a change of approach that I will generalize in integration, apprenticeship, training, later partial unemployment. Mobilizing the players and encouraging them first, then controlling the use of public money and regulating if necessary seems to me an essential step, even if it goes against the grain of our administrative culture. “
Equal opportunities. “A society that massively reproduces social destinies from generation to generation may appear democratic in law, but it is not perceived as such. When the gap between the promise of equal opportunities and reality becomes too large, people turn away from democratic values, seeing in them at best only incantations without effect, at worst a discourse allowing to hide and perpetuate injustices. “
Push the walls
By Muriel Pénicaud, Editions de l’Observatoire, 352 pages, 21 euros.
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