One of the few constants in political science, is that in any democracy, an outgoing majority has the greatest difficulty in getting re-elected when unemployment rate is decreasing. Unemployment will be the main enemy of Barak Obama in one year from now, as it will be in a few months, that of Nicolas Sarkozy.
The facts are terrible: more than 17% of Americans of working age are unemployed. More than 22.7 million Europeans, or 10% of the economically active population also, including 5.1 million under the age of 25, or 20% of them. This rate even reaches 21 % in Spain and even 46 % of young people in Spain. In France, the unemployment rate exceeds 10%, that of young people exceeds 23% and even reaches 40% in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
President Sarkozy is right to say that we will not solve this problem with a surge of additional budgetary spending, assisted jobs or public employment; and even if a tax increase is inevitable, it is time to make the best use of public spending, and not increase it. He is also right to remind us that unemployment is structural, and will require time, lots of time to reduce it.
We can on the other hand question his speech about the current good performance in the birth rate being an enemy of employment. First, because today’s birth rate will create job-seekers only in 20 years at least. Then, because the population growth increases demand and therefore economic growth. Finally, because the growth of the economically active population (140,000 more people are entering the labor market every year in France than are exiting, unlike Germany) allows the financing of pensions and thus does not make them weigh on the country’s competitiveness. It is urgent to make employment the major theme of the campaign. And for this, to remember, six facts:
1. Labour flexibility does not guarantee employment (as shown in the Spanish case, where over a third of employees are in CDD or fixed-term contract) 2. Unemployment is not inevitable in times of crisis, as shown in the Netherlands, (with only 4.3% of the economically active population unemployed), and to a lesser extent, Germany.
3. The reduction of working time is good for employment: the Netherlands has the lowest annualized working time in Europe, and Germany has developed part-time jobs instead of laying off.
4. The preparation to retraining of the long-term unemployed, heavily practiced in the Netherlands, is essential in the fight against the distancing from the labor market. But France, like Spain, the United States and other countries have focused on flexibility, and not at all on security. And we should certainly not, on the pretext of budgetary savings, forgo the urgency of training the unemployed and help them in their reintegration, which can be done on an ongoing budget. Otherwise, we will come in Europe, particularly France, to a situation where, as in the United States, millions of people will be permanently unemployable: the unemployment rate will double.
5. In particular, all experiments show that helping people without jobs start businesses, which a significant proportion of them can do, costs less than unemployment benefits.
Unemployment is not inevitable. Still it is necessary to make of every man, every woman, the real priority of politics.