Unemployment, wealth and moral risk

The category of duty made a triumphant return to the vocabulary of the political and social life of our country. In the ideological revival of this one, the publications of Denis Kessler occupy an important place in France and it is not too honor to honor the ex-vice-president of the Medef May it lend it this decisive role in the transformations of our socio-political landscape. Among the various articles preceding the employer project of a Return to employment assistance contract which will become after discussion and negotiation Bare (Return to employment assistance plan) No doubt is that entitled “ The future of social protection Who appears to be the most remarkable in his argument and not without some originality at the time of the international economic crisis. We learned that “ markets appear safer today than certain collective systems “, that “ Their signatures appear to be greater than that of the State “Or even if the uncertainties of the State” the markets offer risk covers that satisfy households ». American popular households ruined by the subprime crisis know something about it and at a time when we want to take better account of the responsibilities before bankruptcy, no doubt it would also be necessary to be attentive to intellectual responsibilities. However, it is more precisely another theme that occupies us here. A few lines further Denis Kessler added: “ The markets treat much more effectively than social insurance well known to risk economists like that of the moral risk ». We will have recognized there, an Anglo-Saxon theme, according to which the moral risk (“ Morale Hazard ») Appears when a social protection system arouses a change in behavior leading to relationships of dependence or more directly when individuals divert such a device for personal purposes. Kessler thus concluded his analysis: “ We have returned to a complex era, partly of assistantship, because there is a dissociation between contributions and services. (…) This is what was done with the minimum insertion income. Rights without owe, rights which are not the counterpart of a contributory effort is what is called assistance ». The seduction of French employers by Blairism was then at its height and a theorist of “ New Labor “, Anthony Giddens, could declare that the policy of” third way “Was for motto” No rights without responsibilities ». Explaining “ that the expansion of individualism must correspond an extension of individual obligations: unemployment benefits for example having to lead to the obligation to actively seek work ».

Care, if he had not been tempered by the negotiation of social actors in Barealready suggested that the beneficiaries could lose their allowances after several refusals of employment and encouraged the relocation of future hires. The idea of ​​a “ behavior monitoring », Prodged by Kessler in the article already quoted, has since made its way and this in the double sense that the English word supposes of monitoring and regulation unemployed. There “ Law of 2008-758 of 1^er August 2008 relating to the rights and duties of job seekers Seems to echo him and depend on the same theoretical bases.

It should first be noted that this unpacking on the homework A very little accompanied by rights has been accompanied as this may have been the case in certain other devices in Europe such as for example in Denmark often shown as an example. The law of 1^er August does not come back to the rights ; No doubt they appear sufficient in the eyes of the legislators. However, it seems that there is not exactly this: in fact, this new inflection given to the compensation systems is part of a situation of deterioration of the standard of employment and the living conditions of employees.

Between July 2005 and July 2007, the number of job seekers compensated for unemployment insurance and the solidarity regime (specific solidarity allowance, integration allowance, and retirement equivalent allowance) reduced by 489,300 for a total of 2,088,200 people in July 2007. Only six out of ten job seekers are compensated and among them, the share of the beneficiaries of the unemployment insurance plan managed by The Unédic has decreased. The reforms taken place in 2004 and 2006 have “ restricted the conditions of access and limited compensation periods “Explain the report of the Poverty Observatory while” employment is less and less protective ». In 2005, the only figure in the observatory, “ France had 1.7 million workers poor, or 7% of workers ». Not only this duty regime appears in a context of Decline of rights The most humble workers or decline in the possibilities of negotiating these employees, but he will now start the conditions of resistance of the intermediate fractions of the wage earning before the degradation of their standard of employment: these “” middle classes »On which Louis Chauvel wonders by circumscribing them around a net salary between 1,500 and 2,300 euros. It is these employees who will be even more than the excluded of the compensation system concerned by the rhetoric of duty.

The argument of abuse, the discourse of monitoring implemented in the 2000s were pseudo-arguments. We had so far believed that unemployment was an objective effect of the labor market and its fluctuations and not the result of an effect of the compensation system. We do not see how we should radically return to this explanation and stop measuring all the consequences on a national and international scale. Should we ask the unemployed to invent jobs ? Should they be forced to create them in new informities and precariousness as we can sometimes see in what affects local jobs today ? Or it is necessary to seem to seem cheesy rethinking the relationship to employment and its sharing in new investment expenses around knowledge ? There is nothing rocket science for the explanation of the shortage of labor in certain sectors such as building or catering: their strong precariousness, their weak remuneration, the arduousness and the dangerousness of work. So it is because certain companies and certain sectors do not take their responsibilities and maintain their job market in a situation of archaism that a persistence shortage exists and the discourse of duty does not improve working conditions will never end-unless it becomes forced again-only by producing increasingly precarious and more and more frustrated workers turnover and disloyalty.

The arguments of monitoring and abuse reduce the situation of unemployment to an instrumentation of compensation and to a calculation, where it is first an experience with all its social thickness and that even when it could be diverted from its only immediate economic purpose of job search, it engages a dimension of meaning and meaning. It being understood that unemployment is an objective economic fact and not the arbitrary result of the will, the event Unemployment is part of a history and more or less long socio -professional experiences, with their difficulties, their humiliations, their hopes. It cannot be understood in a homogeneous way while it is a multiplicity of social variables. A situation of professional failure which sometimes can be redoubled with a marital failure is poorly lends itself to reactivity in terms of employment, the aspiration for a different activity than that which is offered according to your school title too. The situation is often all the more disturbing and borders on the paradoxical injunction as the job offers are rare or otherwise only offer jobs with degraded working conditions. To ignore the meaning, to ignore these contradictions and paradoxes is even more than unemployment itself ruin the psychosocial balance of an individual and to continue to make social a space always pre-democratic where the question of equality continues to burst. The need for conceptualization on the individual in the context of the market is a shame on the democratic ambition that has been going through our societies for two centuries and probably it is also by inventing more and more speech and representation in social devices that unemployment will be able to find a new treatment-including to overcome the forms of socio-cultural trap with poverty.

The cyclical success of neoliberalism shamelessly nourished the contempt for the wealthy, for employees whose two figures have been particularly stigmatized: the official and the unemployed. Without denying archaisms and reform needs, we must remember an element of political wisdom that classical political philosophy as much as modern has so far not forgotten. THE “ Morale Hazard In its most serious consequences and in its most contrary consequences to democratic freedoms and values ​​is first of all a fact of the rich. As a certain news showed us the bait of the gain may well appear without limits and the desire for domination in the violation of freedoms and the contempt of the other being always greater. The old stake of distrust of wealth is not so moral, as a certain Christian tradition thinks, but very political in the relationship of possession with unlimited. Heir to the two traditions the young Marx had pointed out in capitalism the become an excess standard and the insatiable movement of subordination of social relations to the goods. We will once again understand that the fact does not lift in individual will but is inherent in a certain political relationship. The United States from this point of view has shown us some examples to meditate and among the most significant there are these “ golden parachutes And these exceptional remuneration that managers have granted themselves during the crisis of subprimes than the ever greater subordination of political power in economic power. The excess of money and possession is manifested more and more in a world confronted with pauperism and the ecological dangers by the constant pressure that North American businesses pose over policies and parliamentarians in the United States. By a growing flow of money, large companies flood the political sphere in order to influence decisions that always more strongly engage the lives of citizens. This singular mixture between financial, political and media power is undoubtedly the most radical manifestation of “ moral risk Which is looming at the edge of this century there as well as here.