Introduction

Two reforms where implemented in France in 2021. The unemployment insurance reform reduced the benefit for 41 per cent of the unemployed. Among the goals set and presented as such by the French government were to limit short-term jobs and to reduce the benefit for those switching from a situation of employment to a situation of unemployment. The vocational training reform – which enhances the vocational training remuneration – gave access to vocational training remuneration for ‘young people who carry out, in a public or private organisation, a support training course’ (Finance Law, 29 December 2020). These two reforms illustrate the continuation of the French style of activation of social spending, which borrows from a liberal and social democratic logic. According to the European Union glossary, activation policies are designed to ‘encourage the unemployed to intensify their job search after an initial period of unemployment, by making the receipt of benefits conditional on participation in programmes’.

Jean-Claude Barbier proposes to use the concept as soon as an explicit link is introduced ‘between social protection and employment and labour market policies’ (Barbier, 2002: 308). Like other researchers, he identifies two activation regime poles: the universalist, social democratic regime and the liberal regime. The social democratic regime is characterised by the implementation of high and long-lasting replacement benefits for activity income based on a ‘diversified and extensive’ set of social services (Barbier, 2002: 317). Under the liberal regime, active public policies play a much more limited role as an ‘incentivised transition to the mainstream market’ (Barbier, 2002: 315). No country fits neatly into either regime in this typology, and the analyses diverge as to the characterisation of the French activation model (Béraud and Eydoux, 2009), as it borrows from both activation regimes.

In France, activation policies have become a common paradigm of employment policies (Erhel, 2014). In short, the activation regime of French employment policies takes the form of a wide variety of measures, a generalisation of individualised support, a focus on the responsibility of the unemployed, an increased control logic towards the ‘beneficiaries’ and the actors who implement it, and an increased logic of counterparts of the support measures.