Not everyone is on the minimum wage, she recalled, and everyone wants to live decently from their work. For the CFDT, yesterday’s conference therefore marks the start of discussions covering all companies and all pay scales.
The union is setting a tight timetable for the private sector: two weeks, which it presents as a last-chance deadline to open negotiations and reach an agreement on wages. Marylise Léon specified that she would attend this meeting, announcements having already been made on the private-sector side.
For years, she recalled, the union has denounced public aid — exemptions from social contributions or direct subsidies — that companies deem unwarranted as soon as they are asked to raise wages or to act on employment for young people and older workers.
Employers’ organizations warn that a wage increase, including of the minimum wage, could eliminate jobs. Asked about this point, Marylise Léon does not necessarily see it as a threat, but rather as a warning that employers regularly brandish.
The government, for its part, wants to make companies’ reductions in social contributions conditional on hiring. For the CFDT, this approach moves in the direction of requiring a counterpart from employers.
According to her, these warnings mainly reflect a refusal to have the wage issue dealt with in their place. The CFDT, by contrast, intends to hold employers accountable and to make the conference a starting point, with the state of the negotiations then to be examined.
At every request, she indicated, the employers’ response is the same:"We do not have the means to do it, so you have to help us."The social conference must, in her view, finally make it possible to attach conditions to a number of these forms of aid. The stakes, she says, go beyond the minimum wage alone: it is a matter of opening genuine negotiations on all pay scales, in the private sector as in the civil service, and of linking public aid to companies to concrete commitments.