The current crisis explodes all established records. According to final data published on Thursday by INSEE, the French economy destroyed 502,400 jobs in the first quarter, or as much in three months - and, in reality, in March alone - as in a year and a half at most. the post-2008 financial crisis. This terrible result, 10% higher than the first estimate made in mid-May, almost cancels the half-million jobs that have been created in France since the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017. This an unprecedented plunge in salaried employment over three months also contrasts with the levels of job creation recorded in recent years: 58,100 jobs per quarter on average between 2015 and 2020; and 33,200 over the last decade.
Read also: Amending budget, job cuts, growth ... The government is reviewing its copy
This drop in employment at the start of the year was mainly fueled by the temporary agency collapse: 318,100 jobs destroyed in this sector over three months, an unprecedented fall - again, in reality, in just a few days - by 40.4%.
Excluding temporary work, all branches are diving: the industry, which is ending a series of eleven straight quarters in a row here, has destroyed 11,300 jobs, or a third of the recovery started in 2017; construction, which hoped to exceed 100,000 jobs recreated in three years, wiped out 5600; and the tertiary sector, which had not known a single quarter in the red since 2013, cut more than 150,000 jobs in just a few days.
Over one year, destruction has already exceeded 315,000, a level which has only been exceeded in the rolling 12 months two times since the creation of the statistical series in late 1971, during two crises: a first time in early 1993, where the the number of positions cut, smoothed over one year, exceeded 3 15,000 for three consecutive quarters; and a second time in early 2009, where the bar was higher, for a few months, at 400,000 annually. The fact remains that this record of salaried jobs destroyed over a year should be exceeded when the results for the second quarter of 2020 are published, which will integrate the months of April and May of total or partial containment.
Ambitious forecasts
In his third amending finance bill for 2020 presented this Wednesday in the Council of Ministers, Bruno Le Maire also expects a decline in paid employment of ... 800,000 in the coming months. With, as a corollary, an unemployment rate which will jump beyond 10% of the active population at the end of this year, whereas it had reached 7.8% at the end of March, its lowest level in ten years.
Read also: The staggering cost of the health crisis for France
Ambitious forecasts given the violence of the crisis, but achievable "if we roll up our sleeves, if we all get back to work, if we accelerate the economic recovery," said the Minister of Economy, who expects " a return to normal this summer ” . To confirm. The Banque de France anticipates a spike in the unemployment rate around 11.5% in mid-2021, 0.7 percentage points higher than the absolute record reached in mid-2014 ...
A quarter of European jobs threatened
A report, published by McKinsey, figures at 26% the number of European jobs threatened by the current economic crisis and fears a doubling of the unemployment rate this year, which could exceed 12%, a record! According to the American consultancy, the pandemic will also accelerate the transformation of employment in Europe, which will be more concentrated geographically with half of the jobs to be taken up by ... 48 cities.
A wave of automation, already underway, will also affect a little less than a quarter of existing jobs, or 53 million, according to the score achieved by the French Éric Hazan, partner at McKinsey. Unsurprisingly, the jobs most affected by the deployment of machines are also those who are most exposed to the crisis today, starting with those in distribution.
Read also: These struggling food manufacturers
According to McKinsey, the supply of labor will further decrease in the decade, by 4% due to the aging of the population and by 2% due to the decrease in hours worked per week. Finally, 94 million people will have to undergo specific training by 2030 to adapt to the new digital economy and thus keep their jobs.