Increase in the minimum wage: “The first thing we could do in a budget today is to rehabilitate the wealth solidarity tax,” suggests Guillaume Lacroix, president of the Radical Left Party

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the duel above. Click on the video to watch it in full. Myriam Encaoua: We begin this duel with a first question: should we finally increase the minimum wage, since it has not been increased since 2012?

The unions are demanding this increase in unison. They said it loud and clear in massive processions, which brought together 1,600,000 people, according to the CGT throughout the country, and 600,000 for the Ministry of the Interior, with the response of a Minister of Labor on TF1 who was a little skeptical. Guillaume Lacroix, the cost of living, purchasing power, these are really the absolute priority.

Yesterday we saw extremely different audiences in the processions, private, public, young people, retirees. They all say they can't take it anymore, they can't do it anymore. We need to increase this minimum wage, and if so by how much?

Guillaume Lacroix: The question of purchasing power is the priority, because it is reality. This is the reality of French people. And that's what they say in the streets and that's also what they say even when they can't afford to go to demonstrate because gasoline is too expensive or because the demonstrations are mainly in big cities, far from where they live.

Purchasing power is obviously the question of salaries. And it is the rehabilitation, first of all, of the union and employer forces in social dialogue to allow salary changes. We cannot experience salary developments only by talking about the minimum wage.

We need to talk about all salaries in this country. But you, for the PRG, do you want this increase, beyond indexation to inflation? I want the salaries.

Everything is increasing in this country. I want wages to increase but we cannot do it while being completely outside the economic realities of a country that is collapsing, outside the budgetary realities of a country that is ruining itself. We can't just announce it to have fun on the sets, because it's making people dream without having the means.

Around thirty euros gross, around twenty euros net, would that be in the government's pipeline? It's salaries, absolute emergencies, it's purchasing power, it's gasoline, it's gas, it's fuel oil... It would cost four and a half billion to help those most in difficulty, those most impacted by the increases on these three essential products. Four and a half billion is roughly what the Solidarity Tax on wealth would have brought in, which would moreover only bear its name very well if we were talking about solidarity.

Machine-translated from French