the Trojan horse of social regression”

Sixteen personalities, including MEPs Yannick Jadot and Aurore Lalucq, the mayor of Grenoble, Éric Piolle, the ecologist deputy Éva Sas or the academic Dominique Méda, sign a platform to denounce a derogatory measure adopted in the finance bill corrigendum 2022. The latter stipulates that the employee, in agreement with the employer, may waive all or part of the days or half-days of rest acquired over a period. A measure that hides, according to them, “the end of the framework and collective guarantees of working time and the consecration of mutual agreement leaving the employee alone with the employer. »

Here is their forum: “In the course of the 2022 amending finance bill, the presidential relative majority, supported by Les Républicains and the National Rally, succeeded in the feat of having a measure derogating from the Labor Code passed, which increases the link of subordination between the employee and the employer, weakens the social dialogue in the company and deals an unprecedented blow to the 35 hours.

It stipulates that “the employee, whatever the size of the company, may, at his request and in agreement with the employer, give up all or part of the days or half-days of rest acquired for periods after the January 1, 2022 and until December 31, 2023 in application of an agreement or collective agreement establishing a system for reducing working hours”. It is also specified that “the corresponding hours are not deducted from the legal or conventional overtime quota”, which would make it possible not to count these monetized hours, and therefore to dispense with any reference to the legal duration. work.

Today, the payment of RTT days is only possible if a company or branch agreement signed by trade unions representing the majority of staff provides for it or if the absence of RTT taking is attributable to the employer.

Behind this amendment, which is adorned with the virtues of “win-win”, actually hides the end of the framework and collective guarantees of working time and the consecration of mutual agreement leaving the employee alone with the employer. The absence of social negotiation conditionality to activate this system offers a formidable unilateral tool for questioning the 35-hour week, at a time when the undesirable effects of the Macron ordinances of 2017 are materializing, reducing the coverage of companies by union delegates and employee representative bodies.

How can we not see this as a powerful lever for the employer, allowing him to refuse the allocation of rest days by arguing that they are paid, faced with an employee torn between his need for rest and the improvement of his power? purchase? Relative improvement moreover, because proposing to pay RTT increased to 10% rather than overtime increased to 25%, is to offer to “work a lot more to earn little”.

Thus, like the multiple bonus schemes, this provision serves above all to avoid dealing with the real subject of purchasing power: wage increases. An issue that should give rise to major collective bargaining at the inter-professional level, in the branches and in the companies.

But that’s not all: today the “framed” possibility of monetization is subject to contributions, thus contributing to the financing of social protection. The new provision exempts the employer from paying employer contributions, which weakens this financing.

Finally, what about the reversal of the “candidate president” who had made his own, during his campaign, the concept of “time bank”?

This idea, which is part of the liberating perspective of giving individuals control over their life choices, would make it possible to adapt their working time throughout their professional life by means of a “universal time savings account”, portable and not monetizable. The subject is supposed to be on the menu for a consultation in the fall with the social partners, of which no one really knows the outlines yet. This way of pre-empting it in a perspective radically opposed to the philosophy desired by its promoters, to seal a majority of circumstances, is a sad illustration of the pretense of “at the same time”. Above all, it testifies to a deliberately maintained confusion between logics of commodification and emancipation. »