Increase in the minimum wage: the government proposes 15 euros, the CFDT demands 100 euros

The government plans to raise the interprofessional minimum wage for growth (SMIC) by nearly 15 euros net per month before January 1, 2027. According to Les Échos, this measure studied by the executive aims to defuse the inter-union strike day of November 5. She came up against the union front led by the general secretary of the CFDT, Marylise Léon. As early as October 20 on France Inter, the leader denounced “ten years of verticality” of power and demanded a salary shock of 100 euros net per month for all employees and public officials.

This planned increase corresponds to the advance of the legal indexation on inflation, i.e. an increase of around 1%. According to statistics published by Dares, the previous revaluation of January 1, 2026, setting the gross hourly minimum wage at 12.02 euros (+ 1.2%), concerned 2.1 million employees in the non-agricultural private sector, or 11.8% of the workforce.

The government advance would limit the direct additional cost for employers to around twenty euros gross per month and per employee. The union demand for an increase of 100 euros net would represent a jump of more than 7% in the minimum wage, generating an additional burden of more than 2.5 billion euros per year for the private sector, indicates BFMTV.

This shift in framing revives the structural debate on the “smicardization” of the labor market, a phenomenon where increases in the minimum wage exceed the dynamics of collective agreements and crush pay hierarchies.

A second Dares study reveals that 59.6% of minimum wage beneficiaries are women and 21.9% work in very small businesses (VSEs with 1 to 9 employees), compared to 9.5% in groups of 500 or more employees. The concentration reaches 62.3% in fast food, 53.8% in personal services and 31.7% in the food trade. The successive increases in the legal floor without proportional adjustment of the branch scales create a decline where qualified employees start at the minimum wage and remain stuck there for several years. As of December 31, 2025, 2.5% of employees remained covered by collective agreements with minimums below the legal minimum wage.

To force the unfreezing of these conventional scales, the CFDT is deploying a strategy targeted at reductions in employer social security contributions. The system for reducing general charges, decreasing up to 1.6 SMIC, represents more than 70 billion euros of annual budgetary effort for the State. Marylise Léon recommends the pure and simple elimination of these exemptions for companies whose professional sector refuses to negotiate an increase envelope of at least 100 euros. The withdrawal of these reductions would increase the cost of labor by almost 30 points of employer contributions on low wages, removing the financial incentive for employers to maintain remuneration at the legal floor level.

Machine-translated from French