The decree to sanction professional branches whose minimum wages are below the minimum wage was published in the Official Journal

Reductions in employer contributions for companies in professional sectors whose conventional minimums are lower than the minimum wage will be reduced, under a decree published in the Official Journal on Tuesday, November 10. Long-awaited, this decree is one of the measures put forward on Monday by the government to respond to pressure from unions demanding salary increases. Because if no employee can be paid below the minimum wage, their salary progression may be slowed down because the “national professional minimum salary” of the branch to which they belong is lower than the minimum wage.

Sixty-nine branches currently have minimum wages below the minimum wage. The increase in the minimum wage on December 1 should push an additional 64 into non-compliance, according to the Ministry of Labor. A decree criticized by the unionsFor companies in a branch to be financially sanctioned, their branch minimum must have remained below the minimum wage "during the entire previous calendar year", specifies the decree, a modality criticized by the CGT.

For trade unionist Agathe Le Berder, "the main problem with this decree is that collective sanctions work very, very slowly, since it takes a whole year of non-compliance to be sanctioned." Unions have long criticized the lack of conditionality in contribution reductions. The concentration of these reductions around the lowest wages also makes wage increases more costly for employers, and thus slows down wage progression.

The scale of these reductions was frozen last June, during the last revaluation of the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, to the great dismay of employers' organizations.

Machine-translated from French