TRUE OR FALSE. Are the boosts to the minimum wage “exceptional” and “not frequent”, as the Minister of Labor asserts?

Will the government boost the minimum wage to calm social anger after several weeks of mobilization against the high cost of living and for young people? The subject is at the heart of a social conference which is being held on Monday November 9 in Matignon, between the government and the unions. Also read • Direct Social Conference: "The anger is not going to disappear because the government will have announced a few additional euros on the minimum wage", warns the general secretary of the CGT - follow our live The net monthly minimum wage is today 1,477.93 euros.

The Minister of Labor Jean-Pierre Farandou has already mentioned his wish to see the minimum wage exceed the 1,500 euro mark but not wanting to make too strong an increase which could "harm employment", according to him. He recalled, Friday November 6 on TF1, that government support on the minimum wage is rare. “You know, you don’t get a helping hand very often.

The last one was more than 14 years ago so we can clearly see that there is an exceptional character,” he said. True or False? Boosts every year during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s Boosts have indeed become exceptional in recent decades, but deciding to increase the minimum wage more than its automatic annual increase linked to inflation was quite common during previous decades.

It was even almost systematic for around forty years, from 1968 to the mid-2000s, whether growth was strong or not. The first big boost dates from 1968. At the time, General de Gaulle decided to increase the minimum wage by 35%.

At that point, a boost was truly exceptional, no matter how big or small. But then, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, it became almost systematic. “These nudges especially characterized minimum wage policy in the early 1970s, then again in the early 1980s,” observed a Senate report in 1994.

These boosts played a significant role in the increase in the minimum wage. In 2009, a group of experts commissioned by the Prime Minister explained that "since 1970, the purchasing power of the hourly minimum wage [had] increased by nearly 170%. This increase is shared between the effects of the obligation of indexation on half of the purchasing power of the gross hourly worker wage and the boosts.

From 1970 to 2002, the date of the beginning of the convergence of minimum wages, these boosts represented 60% of the gains in purchasing power of the minimum wage. SMIC replaced SMIG on January 2, 1970, and ended in 1983.

Machine-translated from French