Slight increase in minimum benefits for uninsured unemployed

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French unemployed associations used the 1999-2000 Christmas and New Year period to demand an increase in minimum social security benefits, as they had done in 1997-8. The government responded by raising the three types of minimum benefits for unemployed people not covered by unemployment insurance by 2%. This was judged insufficient by the organisations concerned.

Associations of unemployed people called a demonstration on 11 December 1999, attended by 10,000 people, to demand that the government increase minimum social security benefits paid to unemployed people not covered by unemployment insurance by FRF 1,500 per month. The initiative mirrored similar protests by unemployed people over the Christmas and New Year period in 1997-8 (FR9801189F). A few days before the demonstration, Martine Aubry, the Minister for Employment and Solidarity, had unveiled the following series of measures designed to defuse the protests of unemployed people:

• the "minimum integration income" (Revenu minimum d'insertion, RMI), the "special solidarity allowance", (Allocation de solidarité spécifique, ASS) - the benefits most often claimed by long-term unemployed people - and the integration allowance for former prison inmates (Allocation d'insertion, AI) were increased by 2%. In real terms, as of 1 January 2000, the RMI was increased to FRF 2,552.35 per month for a single person and FRF 3,828.52 for a couple, while the ASS was raised to FRF 2,522.10 and the AI to FRF 1,776.35. Approximately 1.6 million people receive one of these benefits; and

• those receiving the minimum social benefits will be given a one-off payment of FRF 1,000. In addition, the government has decided to exempt minimum social benefit recipients owing significant amounts of outstanding tax from all or part of their debt, on a case-by-case basis.

These measures are seen as far from satisfactory by the APEIS, MNCP and AC unemployed associations. In addition to a more substantial increase in minimum social benefits, they are demanding substantive measures, in particular a complete overhaul of UNEDIC, the jointly-managed agency administering unemployment insurance. These demands are based on the fact that the constant increase in the numbers of unemployed people receiving minimum social benefits is closely linked to successive restrictions introduced into the unemployment insurance system. It is for this reason that a large proportion of those currently unemployed have been shifted from coverage by unemployment insurance to social assistance schemes. Other unemployed workers, because they have not made sufficient contributions to the unemployment insurance scheme, are paid benefits funded by the state, which has increased them only on a small and piecemeal scale. The main unemployed organisations are therefore demanding that the unemployment insurance fund provide a better safety net for "precarious employment" by once again extending coverage to young and long-term unemployed people. Therefore, the associations announced that they would "invite themselves" to the forthcoming, previously postponed negotiations between employers' organisations and trade unions to renew the agreement on which the unemployment insurance scheme is based. These negotiations have been postponed for fundamentally political reasons linked to the threat by the employers to pull out of the management of the various social protection funds (FR9912122F). While the unions and the employers' associations appear to be making the best of this postponement, it will undoubtedly not sit well with unemployed associations.