“Open flash negotiations immediately”: Minister of Labor Jean-Pierre Farandou calls on employers to increase minimums (too often below the minimum wage)

The Minister of Labor Jean-Pierre Farandou chaired a "salary monitoring committee" on Thursday morning to encourage employers to immediately increase the minimums practiced in the different professional branches, three days after government announcements to try to calm the social movement. “Open flash negotiations right away. Don’t waste time.

Get together very quickly. You are going to have to (increase your minimums), so you might as well do it quickly", urged Minister Jean-Pierre Farandou on RMC on Thursday morning, speaking remotely to the social partners. "It's time to mobilize" This salary monitoring committee, which brings together representative trade union and employer organizations at the inter-professional level (CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC, CFTC, Medef, Les Entrepreneurs, U2P) and sectoral (like the union agricultural FNSEA), is not a new body but its pace is “accelerated”, the ministry explains.

After this first committee on Thursday, another will meet in mid-December and a third at the end of January, chaired (unless absolutely necessary) by the Minister of Labor, "guarantor of the process of relaunching salary dynamics". On Monday, the government announced an increase in the minimum wage of 1.6% on December 1 as well as the calculation of reductions in employer contributions on the basis of branch minimums when they are lower than the minimum wage, and no longer on the amount of the minimum wage. The government lists 133 branches, out of the 179 of the general system having more than 5.

000 employees, whose conventional minimums will be on December 1 under the new minimum wage amount. The CGT, which notably includes certain smaller branches, counts 164. The union is demanding "an increase in all salaries of at least 5.3% to pass on the increase in the minimum wage in 2026 to all scales", according to a press release released Thursday morning.

“Monitoring negotiations is very important and we consider that good negotiations happen under pressure from employees, so for us it is the time to mobilize,” underlined Agathe Le Berder, member of the confederal office, at the end of this meeting, while the CGT is calling for strikes and demonstrations in both the public and private sectors on Tuesday. The CFDT, for its part, requested on Monday the opening of negotiations in the branches as quickly as possible and an update on the situation within two weeks.

Machine-translated from French