“Who doesn’t want to see their income increase when they work?”
, asked Catherine Vautrin this Wednesday morning, questioned on
BFM/RMC
about the minimum wage.
The day after Gabriel Attal's general policy declaration, during which the Prime Minister announced that he wanted to
"de-microcardiate France"
, the Minister of Labor, Health and Solidarity defended the minimum growth wage, affirming that it would not be deleted and that the topic was
"to help show that work generates income"
.
“For years in our country, we have been revolving around this notion of the minimum wage
,” she nevertheless lamented, pointing out certain limits of this system today.
Because if
“the minimum wage is the guarantee for our fellow citizens of a minimum wage, as its name indicates”
, the declared desire of the minister and the government
“is to allow our fellow citizens to progress”
.
“What we see is that someone who is on the minimum wage today is someone who receives 1,398 euros, but if we increase it by 100 euros, in reality it costs 260 euros to the company, and he, when we removed the part of the activity bonus, the part of CSG (generalized social contribution), his net balance is only 45 euros
,” she said.
And he says:
“we can see that, ultimately, for a sum that seems interesting at the start, the result is not there”
.
Work “as a tool of emancipation”
The minister thus pleaded to change
“three things”
: first
“that the net gain is more interesting”
, then
“that everyone is at least on the minimum wage”
, while today according to her we have
“ still late"
with no less than
"102 professions"
which pay less than the minimum wage, and finally,
"that those who are just above the minimum wage can benefit from a tax reduction"
, as announced yesterday Gabriel Attal ready to devote an envelope of 2 billion euros to it.
And to take the example of those she nicknames the
“average French”
:
“since 2021, the minimum wage has increased seven times and has completely caught up with the salary of those who are just above it.
That is to say that when those on the minimum wage had a 13.5% increase, the others were at 4%.
And it is these French people who tell you: “it’s simple for me, when it comes to being helped I always earn too much, but when it comes to not being able to count, I am obliged to count and yet I work"".
And to improve the situation of everyone, Catherine Vautrin's idea is firstly,
"to look at what are the charges which, somewhere, immediately come to remove the net effect of the salary increase"
of people on the minimum wage, and secondly,
“to look at how”
, with the envelope of two billion euros announced yesterday, the government
“was going to be able to work with experts to make a specific tax cut for this category of people who are just above the minimum wage
.
And this, with the objective of
“ensuring that work is a tool for emancipation”
.