CHAPTER TEN

Doing more for those who have less

In a world where everything is changing so quickly, the French people need to take more risks and to innovate. That is the essence of the training revolution I outlined in the last chapter. However, in practice, such changes also create new inequalities. On the one hand, some of our compatriots are taking full advantage of the fact that our country is going global. They have received good training, and possess significant financial and cultural capital. On the other, we have more disadvantaged and more vulnerable citizens. Their fate is tied to the prevailing economic climate, and they are the first victims of heightened competition and technological transformations, lack of job security and unemployment, health problems, and the withdrawal of public services.

Some of these disparities can provide insights into why our country is so deeply attached to equality. This conviction distinguishes us from other Western societies, particularly those in the English-speaking world. We are not willing to sacrifice everything in a race for economic growth, or on the altar of individualism. We seek a special kind of freedom — autonomy and independence underpinned by solidarity.

I am a strong believer in a society that provides choices — a society freed of any obstacles, and released from obsolete structural frameworks — in which all individuals can decide how to live their own lives. However, without solidarity, such a society would degenerate into separatism, exclusion, and violence. The freedom to make one’s own life choices would be reserved for the strongest and not for the weakest.

We must therefore invent new means of protection and new ways of providing security. Fundamentally, we need to forge a response to the new inequalities.

For me, such a response comes from a basic awareness that uniformity — of rights, access, rules, aid schemes, and so on — no longer means equality. Quite the opposite. The challenge is no longer to offer everyone the same thing, but to provide each and every person with what they need. This is not the end of solidarity, but, on the contrary, its reinvigouration. When people’s backgrounds and positions are more and more diverse, it is essential to move away from a uniform approach. If we fail to do this, public intervention will perpetuate and even exacerbate inequalities where it ought to correct them.

This requires a radical change in the role of the state. It must become a true “social investor” that sees individuals not as what they are, but as what they can become and what they can contribute to the public good.

So the state must not limit itself to providing a safety net — this is, of course, the least it should do. It needs to enable each and every person, wherever they are, to express all their talents and all their human qualities. This is true for the poorest, towards whom we must not only demonstrate financial solidarity, but furnish a genuine place in our society. It also applies to those who are the victims of ethnic or religious discrimination. Proclaiming rights is not enough. We must fight unstintingly for them to be upheld.

Here, a different method is needed. The state must place the accent on intervention before the fact, which is less costly and more effective. This is particularly evident in healthcare, where an ambitious prevention policy is essential.

Lastly, rights need to be extended to all citizens — particularly in relation to unemployment or pensions, so that special protection schemes do not create obstacles and injustices. The fact that some people have almost no protection and that, at the same time, others benefit from special regimes, is unacceptable. Every individual must have the same rights.

For almost nine million of our compatriots living below the poverty line who, once they have paid their day-to-day expenses, have less than 10 euros a day to live on, poverty is not a risk but a reality. And for the many French people who are constantly on the verge of a downward spiral into hardship, it is a daily concern.

As far as this question is concerned, the political class positions itself according to two predominant points of view, which have been entrenched for a very long time. According to the first view, shared by a number of politicians on the Right, most beneficiaries of social welfare benefits are scroungers. We therefore ought to make the lives of the poorest even more difficult and make them feel guilty about their situation. According to the second view, held by some of those on the Left, we could just pay out a few benefits — without focusing close attention on who receives them. I reject both approaches on the grounds that, once again, they lead to discord at the very heart of French society.

There is also another temptation, spanning both the Left and the Right, which relates to the “guaranteed minimum income”. This would consist of paying everyone — without conditions relating to resources or any other eligibility requirement — an amount that ensures personal subsistence levels. I do see how the idea can be appealing, but I don’t go along with it. First of all, for financial reasons. We would have to choose, on the one hand, between a low minimum income, which would in no way address the questions emanating from serious poverty and would even worsen matters for the deprived, and, on the other, a high minimum income that could only be engineered at the cost of significant tax pressure on the middle classes. But there is an even more fundamental reason. I believe in work as a value, as a means of emancipation, as a vector of social mobility. And I do not believe that some people are, by definition, destined to subsist on the fringes of society, with no other prospects than to spend the limited income allotted to them.

In other words, I believe that we owe solidarity, aid, and consideration to the most vulnerable. Solidarity obliges us first of all to enable the poorest to access the aid to which they are entitled. One-third of the people who could potentially benefit from the “Active Solidarity Income” scheme do not apply for it. Why? For some, because they don’t know it exists. For others, because they choose not to put in an application.

Our duty to respect others means that we must recognise all of their qualities and enable them to find work in our society wherever possible. This takes different forms, depending on the person.

First of all, we have to be uncompromising with cheats — they are far from being in the majority, but they do exist. Because, quite apart from the financial cost that society has to bear as a result of fraudulent claims, these people undermine the very idea of solidarity that keeps us shoulder to shoulder, by feeding into accusations of scrounging and bringing suspicion upon all those who are fully entitled to receive benefits. Social-benefit fraud and tax fraud — the latter far exceeding the former in terms of extent — undermine the trust of many of our compatriots in government action. This requires strong measures to be taken.

We also need to provide diligent and individual support for those who are able to return to the world of work. In this regard, as in so many other areas, the know-how of organisations working on solidarity and social enterprise, which are at the forefront of social innovation outside urban centers, seems to me of vital importance. That know-how deserves to be propagated more widely. Here, too, an ambitious plan providing access to further qualifications, supported by the continuing education reforms that I have already discussed, would offer a real break with the past in view of the tentative measures that have been the norm in the last twenty years.

Lastly, we need to recognise — and understand — that some people are excluded from the labour market for very long periods and that it will be hard for them to ever find work again. They may be disabled, there may be things they cannot do, or they may have had a very challenging life trajectory. And yet they cannot be left by the wayside. We have a duty to offer them, as far as possible, work that is at the same time gratifying for them as individuals and useful for the community. In this way, they can find their place, recover their dignity, and get involved. For too long we have taken it for granted that giving money to people who can no longer make ends meet would settle everything. We owe them much more than this.

Formulating policies to combat poverty hand-in-hand with those affected would be a mark of respect, and a guarantee of the policies’ future effectiveness.

Doing more for those who have less also means not tolerating discrimination — whether related to gender, ethnic origins, sexual preference, opinions, disability, or health issues. Discrimination is intolerable in all its forms, because it is an attack on who we are. Furthermore, discrimination has a high social and economic cost.

The first type of discrimination directly concerns half of the French population — women — every day of the week. Daily life in today’s France is very different depending on whether one is a man or a woman. The labour market is an edifying example. Women are often obliged to work fewer hours: 78 per cent of part-time workers are women. They are paid less: in an equivalent job and working the same hours, a woman will earn 10 per cent less than a man. They also have fewer executive responsibilities: only three of the 40 largest listed French companies that form the CAC40 are headed by women. Only 30 per cent of start-ups are founded by women.

Worse still, and day in, day out, women alone have to endure a form of insecurity that men do not — a thousand-and-one situations on public transport, at work, and in the street that expose them to insidious and unacceptable forms of harassment. This was widely reported by the women we encountered during a public consultation organised in 2016 by En Marche! volunteers.

The second type of discrimination relates to ethnic origins. For a long time, we believed that anti-racism measures were enough to combat the injustice weighing upon all those who are not born with the right skin colour, the right religion, or in the right place. Such mobilisation against racism was highly prevalent in the 1980s. It represented a major, welcome change in awareness for French society, which had tended to see injustice solely in terms of social class. However, this approach, too, had its limits. It often proved to be excessively moralistic, and was inadequate to stop community tensions mounting. More importantly, it did nothing to improve the daily lives of ethnic and religious minorities, who were often alienated by this behavior. Condemning injustice is not enough. We need action.

Overt racism is intolerable — but discrimination is even more insidious, and can be even more destructive. We can take issue with insults and sarcasm. But what can be done in the face of job applications that are never answered, or promotions that are given to everyone else, but not to you? We feel helpless, powerless. We can do very little about this if we act alone. Recent studies have shown that a job candidate appearing to be a Muslim received a quarter of the replies received by a candidate who appeared to be a Catholic. Public authorities must increase the number of checks, and make them systematic and more stringent. Employers with unacceptable practices must realise that they will be identified and fined. The Republic must take a far stronger stand on this issue. I am convinced that we will make no progress as long as people do not feel directly concerned by the problem — in particular, all those who have never experienced discrimination.

Discrimination against women, or ethnic and religious minorities, or disabled persons must not obscure the full picture or the manifold forms of discrimination. The law lists more than twenty. We need to have more weapons in our legislative arsenal, and ensure that laws are enforced — and we must take aim at each and every instance of discrimination. In this area, the law has the potential to make a difference. As an example, it has enabled the proportion of women with seats on boards of directors and supervisory boards at CAC40 companies to be increased: between 2009 and 2015, the number of women increased threefold.

Nevertheless, the law is not enough to combat discrimination, so in parallel we need to develop proactive policies that will allow us to eradicate it. I want to make “testing” policies routine. There are some extremely effective methods such as sending out hundreds of résumés that are identical — apart from the small matter of gender, or ethnic or religious origin — to see whether some, groundlessly, receive fewer replies than others.

Doing more for those who have less, and thereby protecting the weakest, also includes disease prevention. Here, too, there is deep injustice. We often boast about having the best healthcare system in the world. Reality, however, is not so clear-cut. While we have some of the best researchers, hospitals, and healthcare professionals in the world, French healthcare does not provide such high-quality service as is commonly believed and, worse still, harbours severe inequalities.

People are often unaware that France has very mediocre success rates for all of the pathologies that require prevention — cancer, cirrhosis, and so on — and that the first to suffer from these diseases come from underprivileged backgrounds. Let’s take just two examples out of thousands: farmers’ children suffer 50 per cent more from tooth decay than do the children of executives, and obesity is three times higher in factory workers’ children than in those of their managers.

In the light of all this, I do not believe that the solution lies in pitting hospitals against what are called community clinics. On the contrary, wherever possible we should foster complementarity and partnerships among them. Nor do I believe that we should only think about health in terms of budget size or the social security debt. The question is not whether consultation costs should be increased by two or three euros — or not. Once again, we are missing the point and overlooking the real problems.

The fundamental issues are elsewhere. We have to find other approaches to ensure that prevention becomes the cornerstone of our healthcare policy. To find ways and means for people to retain their dignity in old age and remain independent for as long as possible. To stop 73,000 of our compatriots dying every year from tobacco-related illnesses, and 50,000 others from alcohol abuse.

Here, too, we need a revolution — starting with placing a priority on preventive consultations. This means that we need to release doctors from administrative tasks, and new support roles should be created so that they can hand over certain duties. It also means that we need to modernise our economic model. Charging per patient visit cannot continue to be the only way in which general practitioners are paid. New ways of contracting need to be available; for example, we could envisage fixed tariffs for sensitive groups such as the very young and the very old, leaving practitioners free to take them on or not.

I will also maintain a high level of solidarity in healthcare spending. We must move forward in a smart way. And not by making tiny tweaks each year solely to stay within budget. We need to think about reforms, not on a year-to-year basis, as the current healthcare funding approach prompts us to do, but to envision them in the long term. This is the only way to bring about fundamental reforms and to achieve a sustainable transformation of our system.

On that basis, we will be able to take on the much-needed revitalisation of public hospitals. For many years now, they have been facing a serious lack of resources, of capacity, and of common sense. We can no longer ignore this crisis.

We need to separate practices from institutions. The transformation of our healthcare system cannot be managed by central government alone. Once again, I am convinced that we need to give more autonomy to healthcare actors on the ground, in particular at regional level. These are the people who know best the area’s needs and the individual character of its people. This is exactly what I saw in Chamonix, where a health center was created to enable doctors to work more efficiently together, and to invest in infrastructure and in innovative methods such as telemedicine. Or a hospital in Sallanches, where a partnership with private practitioners was established to keep open an institution that had become too small, and to facilitate patients’ speedy discharge in order to reduce costs and improve their care. Change will not be dictated from above. It will be driven at grassroots level.

Lastly, French citizens are not all equal when it comes to unemployment or pensions. Both our unemployment insurance and pension schemes are emblematic of a system that was built for a world where the worker — a man — spent his whole life at the same company. He paid his contributions for his pension and his healthcare, with little fear of being laid off, and without having to consider changing careers. He had no concerns about job insecurity or external competition.

Our system has, of course, been through many changes in the last few decades: we have had four sets of pension reforms since 2003 alone. Despite this, the system still benefits first and foremost those working at large companies, who are in good health, hired on stable contracts of employment, with a linear career path from first job to retirement. But these people are becoming rarer and rarer.

We can no longer accept cobbled-together solutions or the umpteenth discussion about a particular problem. We need to realise that the current system, which depends on each individual’s employment status at their company, and is funded essentially by the workforce, no longer meets the needs of a society that has been suffering from mass unemployment for more than three decades. The focus of debate needs to move away from whether people should retire at 65 or at 62 years of age, or how many qualifying periods are needed to be eligible. Those questions do need to be addressed, of course, with regard to demographic trends, intergenerational fairness, and the financial robustness of the pensions system. The point is not to try to police the line between salaried workers and the self-employed in order to define who can pay into unemployment insurance and who cannot. The real questions that we need to ask ourselves are even more fundamental. How can we take effective action to ensure that no one is sidelined? How can we be sure that everyone can find a place in a society that is so profoundly different from the past?

As the world of work is becoming more and more compartmentalised into a multitude of positions, jobs, and contracts, and as career paths are less linear, our social security system is no longer able to level out inequalities, and in fact feeds into them.

How easy is it for people to understand their pension entitlements when they have worked, for example, first in the public sector, then in the private sector, and were then self-employed, moving from one pension fund to another and from one scheme to another? How can we explain to a farmer who has worked hard all his life that he will receive a negligible pension from the agricultural pension fund, and that his wife who was at his side, helping him every day of their lives, will have nothing? We are all familiar with the nightmare of calculating entitlements when a career has involved several moves. Unfairly, entitlements are very different, even for the same job, depending on one’s contractual status. What social-mobility opportunities do we offer those on tenuous temporary contracts who do not benefit from the prospects they would have at a large company?

The principle for this essential transformation is thus clear: social protection must be forged around and for the individual, with the aim of mainstreaming entitlements and achieving transparency and equality. It is no longer workers, according to their contractual status or category, who need to be protected, but each and every one of us, whatever our situation at a given time, on an equal basis — as is the case now for health insurance.

I have already talked about the need to foster and safeguard career moves. Here I would like to highlight the new social-protection map that ensues. In order to encourage career mobility, the pensions system needs to be simpler and easier to understand. It is not acceptable that it should be so difficult to understand our entitlements, or that they should vary so much depending on our employment history. The various schemes should be merged over the next few years, to gradually create a universal pension scheme. Pensions should not, in the long term, depend on whether people are employed or self-employed, or are civil servants, but on what they actually do. And it is on this basis that the question of how long we should pay into a scheme must be assessed, rather than treating the issue indiscriminately across the board. This would be clearer for everyone, and would at the same time be fairer.

It no longer makes sense, in view of the high risk of unemployment, for our system to be based on such a narrow insurance mechanism. Today, only employed workers are insured. As I have said, mainstreaming and a thorough overhaul of the system are essential. We need a system based on solidarity — to which each person has to contribute, and from which each person can benefit. Such a system would therefore cover not only employed workers who are made redundant or resign from their jobs, but also the self-employed. The implication in terms of funding is that its basis needs to be tax and no longer social security contributions. Similarly, benefits will no longer come under an umbrella of insurance, but of measures fostering solidarity. As a result, the upper threshold for payments, now almost 7,000 euros per month — more than three times higher than the European Union average — will be lowered. There will also be an immediate outcome in terms of governance.

In view of the fact that insurance will no longer relate to one or other category of worker, since social protection will be financed less and less by contributions and more and more by tax, the state will need to take on responsibility for the strategic decisions that thus far have been delegated to social security agencies. Up to now, these organisations, representing both employees and employers, needed to reach agreement on all of the conditions relating to unemployment benefits, such as their amount, duration, and associated obligations on the part of the receiver. Despite this, it is the state that acts as guarantor for the unemployment benefit debt — without having any real say in the way in which the system is organised. It is for this reason that I believe that public authorities should take back responsibility for decisions relating to unemployment insurance. The authorities cannot continue to be the silent guarantors of a crumbling system, where the only option is to place curbs on it. They can no longer simply be the heralds of a compromise … which is never achieved.

Basically, I believe that the state must place the onus on social security agencies in collective-bargaining processes, the oversight of employer firms, and the provision of support for people during their working lives, and reduce these agencies’ input in the management of the system. It is going to be a real battle. It is going to incur the wrath of all those who are comfortably ensconced in the system. But it will be a release for all those compatriots who are currently thwarted by it. So we must, of course, go ahead. It is among the most important items on our agenda that need addressing. There will be no place for dogma, though. No reason to put an end, out of principle, to the participation of social security agencies in governance initiatives, but rather to rebalance the current position. In the area of sickness benefit, for example, governance is balanced and satisfactory.

In the next years and decades, dependency will become more and more of an issue. First of all, because the French population as a whole is ageing: in 2050, one French citizen out of three will be over 60 years old, as against one in five only ten years ago. Next, because the first cohorts of the baby-boom generation will be 80 years old in 2025. A longer lifespan is great news for all of us. However, in order for that progress to be a truly positive step, we should aspire to the adage: “It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” This means that we must enable older people to live their lives to the full, to maintain bonds with others, to get involved when they want to, to travel around as they wish, to be independent for as long as they can, and to continue to make useful contributions to society. The challenge is to ensure that our older citizens can live longer, in good health, and retain their independence.

It’s not enough to agree on the goal — we need to revise our approach to solidarity in order to address the need for integrated care that, by 2050, will probably generate higher levels of spending than on pensions. This issue concerns the whole of society — older people, of course, but also the millions of families and care workers who look after our senior citizens on a day-to-day basis. The difficulty is to address a new set of circumstances, which relate neither to pensions nor to sickness, and which are going to affect all of us, without exception, directly.