“If you increase the minimum wage, you have to maintain the differential in other salaries” explains the president of Entrepreneurs Paris Île-de-France

“If you increase the minimum wage, it is necessary to maintain the differential of other salaries and therefore inevitably, there will be increases which must occur for reasons of sector and also of fairness”, explains Bernard Cohen-Hadad, the president of Entrepreneurs (ex CPME) Paris Île-de-France invited on the evening of Sunday November 8 on franceinfo. According to him, "we have a real problem today of financing these increases which should be announced" on the occasion of the social conference which is to bring together Monday in Matignon and around the Prime Minister, unions and employers. Also read The number of people living in extreme poverty in France increased by 37% between 2018 and 2025, according to data from Restos du Cœur "What we expect is a counterpart to the increase in the minimum wage (...

), that there be a gesture, a unfreezing of reductions in charges, a reduction also in taxes on contributions for young people's jobs (...), a reduction in the tax pressure more generally". Bernard Cohen-Hadad recalls that we are today "at charges on work which are 47 to 53%".

“And then,” he says, “there is also another problem which is the ability to benefit from and strengthen the profit-sharing, participation and value-sharing systems which today are, in principle, taxed whereas we would like them to be reduced.” Also read: 7 million adults in mainland France say they lack food, according to an Action Against Hunger report. Without any action from the State, Bernard Cohen-Hadad judges that this would put the VSEs and SMEs that he represents in difficulty. The representative of Entrepreneurs Paris Île-de-France cited this figure: "over the first 9 months of the year, there were 77,000 business failures while in 2025 over 12 months, there were 60,000 business failures (...

) so you see that the period is not the best." "We are facing international competition, and often when we compare the increase in the SMIC in France with the increase in the SMIC in Europe, we tend to forget that European companies have much less expenses than French companies", points out Bernard Cohen-Hadad.

Machine-translated from French