Is France the European country which has changed its minimum wage the least in ten years, as Yannick Jadot claims?

After another Saturday of demonstrations against the high cost of living and to demand more resources for high schools on October 31, the question of increasing the minimum wage returns to the heart of the discussions. The minimum wage was to be increased by 1% on January 1, 2027 to keep up with inflation, but the government is now opening the door to a higher increase. This is an essential measure, according to Yannick Jadot, environmentalist senator, because France is lagging far behind its European neighbors.

“Over the last ten years, he says, France is the European country which has changed its minimum wage the least.” Also read October 31: The demands of the demonstrators This statement is true, but it needs to be qualified. To answer, we have to look at figures from Eurofound, an agency of the European Union which calculated the increase in the minimum wage in member countries between 2016 and 2026.

Indeed, France comes in last position with less than 10% revaluation at constant inflation level. At the top of the ranking, we find Romania where the minimum wage has increased by almost 140%, so it has more than doubled. In countries like Croatia and Bulgaria, it is an increase of almost 90%.

A catch-up effect of the "new" member countries of the European UnionHowever, this observation needs to be qualified. There was in fact a catch-up effect of the new member countries of the European Union, which joined the EU in the years 2000 and 2010. The minimum wage in these countries was very low compared to the older member countries and therefore had to rise a lot.

In Romania, for example, the equivalent of the minimum wage today is 795 euros gross per month compared to 1,823 euros here. It’s 1,050 euros gross per month in Croatia. To compare France to the “historic” members of the European Union, some do not have a minimum wage.

This is the case of Italy, Sweden and even Austria. Germany, for its part, only recently adopted an equivalent of the minimum wage, in 2015. The other "historic" members of the Union such as Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands have increased their minimum wage more significantly than us.

In Spain for example, the equivalent of the minimum wage was increased by 22% by decree in 2019, it is now 1,381 euros gross monthly. In Belgium it is 2,112 euros, and 2,295 in the Netherlands. In fact in France, the minimum wage has only followed inflation for ten years, without helping to gain purchasing power.

Especially since France has also little increased the value of low salaries, supposed to be just above the minimum wage. These salaries therefore end up being caught up and even exceeded by the minimum wage. According to the CGT, the number of professional branches whose minimum wage is lower than the SMIC has almost doubled since last April, going from 76 to 122.

Machine-translated from French