Full employment is one of the watchwords of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term. However, for Alain Villemeur and Kevin Genna, this indicator hides a much deeper French problem, the employment rate at the ends of the age pyramid. Contrary to the idea that increasing the employment of older people would be to the detriment of youth employment, they propose measures that are commensurate with the social and economic stakes.
This article is excerpted from the first issue of the journal Mermoz, “Work: Reshuffling the Cards”.
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“Not in Education, Employment or Training”
One of the key words of Emmanuel Macron’s second five-year term is full employment, a situation that would be characterized by an unemployment rate of the population below 5%. Although it is desirable, full employment does not solve a structural problem of French employment, the low activity rates at both ends of the age pyramid: among young people (15-24 years old) and among seniors (55+ years old). Therefore, we will focus on two very distinct categories, inactive seniors and Neets 1 .
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2
Castelain, E. (2023), “In 2021, one in six people aged 55 to 69 is neither employed nor retired, a situation most often suffered”, Insee première, n°1946, May 2023.
The employment rate of 55-64 year-olds is 57% in 2023 (Dares, 2023), which places France below the European average (62%) but above all very far from the best European countries such as Germany (73%) or Sweden (77%). Worse still, in a recent study 2 , INSEE shows that in 2021, 16% of individuals aged 55 to 69 were neither employed, nor retired, nor unemployed. This figure even explodes around the age of 61 to reach 28% of individuals. So we have a part of the senior population that is very vulnerable. Added to this is the fact that the vast majority of these inactive people are women (59%) and have few qualifications (42%).
At the same time, a similar observation can be made on the other side of the age pyramid with the problem of Neets, who represent just over 10% of young people aged 15 to 24 in 2022 in France (Eurostat), more than the European average, and this for the first time in 10 years. This is a population that is far from both employment and education, at a pivotal time in working life.
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3
Belkessa L. (2023), “Senior Employment, Youth Employment: Complementarity rather than Substitution?” TDTE Chair, October 2023.
The TDTE Chair has chosen to address the issue of youth and senior employment from the perspective of the activity rate rather than from the perspective of unemployment through several studies presented at the conference “Resolving the Intergenerational Conflict” on October 18, 2022. The increase in the employment of older people is not to the detriment of young people, as all the studies, whether they focus on European or Asian countries, confirm 3.
On the contrary, the employment of older people favours that of young people, because they have complementary skills combining experience and knowledge of companies with new knowledge and innovation. And it has been shown that job satisfaction and training are the most important levers for seniors to extend their careers in companies.
This observation inspired a study of the impact of the simultaneous increase in the employment of seniors and young people, carried out using nested generation modelling, an original model of economic growth developed by the Chair. The result is very striking: an employment target for young people and seniors, joining those in Germany by 2040, is likely to increase the current GDP by about 8 points, i.e. 200 billion euros of additional wealth. The additional tax revenues would make it possible to virtually absorb the current public deficit.
The stakes are so high that they warrant new and ambitious policies to promote both the entry of young people and the retention of older people in the labour market. For young people, it was suggested that the second chance school approach for Neets should be generalised, that the learning trajectory should be continued and improved at all levels of education and that their integration into the labour market should be strengthened. For seniors, it is a question of strengthening continuing training, especially after the age of 50, of improving their working conditions by adopting more flexibility in organizations and schedules; However, it is also necessary to increase the satisfaction felt at work and this is why the Chair has proposed a Career Reflection Leave at the age of 50 so that each worker can reflect on his or her future activities and the means to be implemented to maintain the desire to work.