French reforms aim for a new social contract in the age of disruption

French President Emmanuel Macron pushes forward his reforms despite resistance. (Getty/WorldPost illustration)
French President Emmanuel Macron pushes forward his reforms despite resistance. (Getty/WorldPost illustration)

Just as the welfare state was born out of the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, so too a new social contract must emerge today as the economic ground shifts again with the dislocations of globalization and the steady disruptions of digital capitalism.

The paradigm for such a contract, rooted in the idea of “flexicurity,” is beginning to take shape in reforms around Europe. This approach, coined by the Danish government in the 1990s, combines flexibility in the workplace to accommodate the robust dynamics of trade and innovation with a universal safety net and opportunity web that catches those who fall in the cracks and helps them move on and up. Above all, it seeks to support the overall well-being of workers instead of protecting specific jobs. The present French reforms under President Emmanuel Macron and earlier efforts in Germany over a decade ago are versions of the successful Nordic model attempted in larger nations.

Although flexicurity removes the barriers to innovation and job creation and tempers the consequences of precarious employment, experience so far has shown that it alone does not dramatically reshape the landscape of growing inequality. If digital capitalism continues to divorce productivity and wealth creation from employment and income, as intelligent machines displace labor, more is needed. The next piece of a new social contract thus must not only entail investment in public higher education to provide the skills required to navigate the new economy but also must include a scheme through which all citizens own an equity share in the robots creating all that new wealth. Though not yet on the drawing board, that is the inevitable next step.

The WorldPost this week focuses on the present French reforms and compares them to similar German reforms under then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder back in the early 2000s.

Jean Pisani-Ferry, widely regarded as the “eminence grise” behind Macron’s labor proposals, explains the new approach in an interview. “The reforms currently under discussion,” says Pisani-Ferry, “combine a broadening of the access to unemployment insurance that would eventually turn it into a universal safety net for all those suffering an income drop as a consequence of economic disruption, irrespective of their status.” Under the current system, unemployment insurance is tied to those who have been employed for a vested period.

Reforms already implemented by Macron earlier this fall allow companies more flexibility to hire and fire workers according to the ups and downs of the economy. In response to critics who argue that the 39-year-old president is turning the socially protective French system into American-style job and benefit insecurity, Pisani-Ferry responds: “We have already become more American. Job security has diminished, and the gig economy is already here. Blame digital technology, deindustrialization, globalization — you name it. The risk now is that dualism becomes entrenched, with secure, well-paid jobs at one end and precarious, low-paid jobs at the other end.”

Economist Jean Tirole concurs. “In the absence of reform, the percentage of job creations via short-term contracts is likely to increase, as no firm will want to create permanent jobs in an era of rapid job obsolescence associated with artificial intelligence and mechanization. Upward mobility has stalled. And the protection of workers will be jeopardized if the heavy public expenditure around the labor market proves to be unsustainable,” the Nobel laureate writes from Toulouse.

He continues: “France’s labor market is under pressure from multiple forces, including the accelerating destruction of jobs and fragile public finances. The country’s labor system is inefficient and possibly unsustainable. To remedy this, Macron urgently needs to upend the status quo to protect workers, rather than jobs.” Tirole acknowledges that in the shorter term, inequality may well increase because of eased hiring and firing regulations. But, he concludes, “Inequality won’t be solved by adhering to the status quo and the quick fixes of the past.” 

This is the weekly roundup of The WorldPost, of which Nathan Gardels is the editor in chief.

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