Recruitment, apprenticeship, immigration law: Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet's ideas for responding to tensions in Aveyron

Dans le Sud-Aveyron, la ministre a rencontré Frédéric Boissière à la tête de l’entreprise de 35 salariés. Midi Libre – Michael Esdourrubailh

At the end of her trip to Aveyron, the Minister for Labour and Employment visited the Boissière et fils company in Saint-Beauzély to discuss apprenticeships and recruitment.

As today in Saint-Beauzély, you met with many business leaders in Aveyron to discuss recruitment and apprenticeships. What was the outcome? ?

I am here first of all to listen. But what we can say is that tensions do indeed exist around recruitment, at all levels of qualification, in all professions. We must therefore work better, which is what France Travail is already starting to do, on pre-employment training, in immersion, around the discovery of professions in connection with what the CCI, the Chamber of Trades and National Education are already doing. The challenge is now to generalize these initiatives.

You also insist on apprenticeships. However, if they are finally maintained for 2025, aid for hiring apprentices will decrease compared to previous years

We have managed to find a compromise with a decree that will be released in a few days. We previously had aid that concerned all qualification levels of 6,000 euros, regardless of the size of the company. The aid is reduced to 5,000 euros for companies with fewer than 250 employees and to 2,000 euros for companies with more than 250 employees. We decided to differentiate based on the size of the company – because we have to remember that 80% of apprentices in our country are in companies with fewer than 250 employees – but not based on the level of qualification because it is extremely important to show that apprenticeship is the path to excellence for all qualifications.

Planned by the immigration law promulgated in early 2024, the update of the list of occupations in shortage in which undocumented workers can be regularized should be published “at the end of February”.Isn’t this also a way of responding to the needs expressed by VSEs and SMEs? ?

The subject is first of all to aggregate a list of jobs in tension by region, which is precisely what we are currently doing with the Ministry of the Interior. I think it is very important that the Ministry of the Interior understands, and this is what we are doing with Bruno Retailleau, that there are really sectors today in tension that also depend on a foreign workforce. It is also up to us – we have 550,000 jobs today that are unfilled in our country – to better train our job seekers, or even those who are working today, and for whom retraining may be necessary. Foreign labour should not be the easy solution, to answer, we must say things frankly, to jobs that are not necessarily attractive and on which employers do not necessarily make the efforts to make them more attractive and to attract a workforce that is already on French soil.

The Boissière et fils company has introduced a four-day work week. Can and should the State encourage companies in this direction? ?

Are these 4-day weeks, over 4 days? ? The terms are very different. I think that the State should not be interested in this question and I will tell you why. Because it should not be a uniform answer. Here, at Boissière, it corresponded to a need, to a better organization, it corresponded to the social dialogue in the company. This is not necessarily the case elsewhere. So I think that it is rather at the level of the companies that the dialogue must take place to avoid what could have been done with the 35-hour week, with a uniform decision, whatever the size, private, public. On the other hand, we must encourage the vitality of the social dialogue and the social partners to take hold of these questions of organization of working time which promote the attractiveness of the professions, the working conditions, and also save on transport.