Possible increase in the minimum wage during the social conference: “22 euros is 73 cents per day”, recalls Rokhaya Diallo, the publishing director of Politis

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the interview above. Click on the video to watch it in full. Franceinfo: Good evening Rokhaya Diallo, president of “Politis”, columnist at the Guardian, you are debating with Charles Sapin, deputy director of “Valeurs contemporains”.

22 euros is perhaps the figure that Sébastien Lecornu will announce [Monday November 9] during the meeting in Matignon with the social partners. 22 euros net more for the minimum wage, to bring it to 1,500 euros net. For Jean-Pierre Farandou, the Minister of Labor, everything that the other unions are asking for - +150 euros, +100 euros, raising the minimum wage to 1,700 euros net - would destroy more than 230,000 jobs.

And surprise, Marine Le Pen agrees with him. Does it surprise you, Charles Sapin, that Marine Le Pen opposes the increase in the minimum wage? In the streets last Thursday, there were undoubtedly many of his voters who can no longer make ends meet.

Charles Sapin: You are right, but not all of these voters are on minimum wage and the problem is that all the presidential candidates are equal in the face of the reality of the country's financial situation. Everyone knows that there is a wall of debt with deficits that we have lost control of, so we cannot promise anything. And there, you have a social conference called by the Prime Minister, the Minister of Labor...

But it's going to be a shadow play. We can clearly see that the government no longer has the means, neither political nor financial, to make a move. They no longer have the political means because they no longer have a majority in the Assembly.

And they don't have the financial room for maneuver because the debt is there, the deficits are there. We have seen that OATs, what France borrows from in the medium term, are exploding. So the CGT, the CFDT, true to themselves, are demanding an increase in the minimum wage.

But it would be an economic disaster. If you increase the minimum wage by 200 euros... Nobody demanded 200, we are at a maximum of 150 for the CGT.

If I say 200, it's because it's so that people understand the idea. This is 150 euros more in employer contributions, at a time when all companies are already suffocated by employer contributions which are the highest in all OECD countries. Here, we are in a year where you had 70,000 companies going bankrupt.

This is a record figure in recent years. That's an increase of 4%. If you increase employer contributions, there will be additional business closures.

Machine-translated from French