ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

From France Christian Bouzols on how the French government is looking to reduce its budget deficit.

In its effort to reduce a record budget deficit, the new French government has been considering various ways to save on its expenditure, aiming notably at the subsidies given to companies and local authorities. One potential avenue it has been thinking of is to reduce the funding given to companies to help them reduce the burden of social security charges on the people they employ. This potential measure would be focused on wages situated below the 1.2 times the minimum wage level.

This is a cause of considerable worry to the French cleaning sector. That’s because it is a labour-intensive industry with structurally low profit margins. The French cleaning federation (FEP) says if these proposals were implemented, they would be disastrous for the cleaning sector. In fact, the FEP estimates they would hit net profits to the tune of 30 to 50 per cent.

Cutting nearly half of company profits would be “quite unbearable at a time when companies have to put up with unprecedented economic difficulties,” FEP said. More specifically, these difficulties have been caused by the fact that since 2021 they have been legally prevented from passing on to their customers all the rising costs inflation has imposed on them; by the enforcement of EU legislation concerning paid sickness leave; by the cancellation of public subsidies to sandwich courses or work-linked training programmes; and finally, by the plan to abolish the financial help the state was giving to companies to help them alleviate the cost of work stoppages.

For Philippe Jouanny, FEP president, “these nefarious measures, that have been envisaged without any discussion with our sector, would have the immediate effect of putting an end to the large-scale recruitment we have been achieving (we’ve created 110,000 new net jobs in 10 years), thus depriving thousands of potential newcomers of work opportunities. All this would give rise to a major crisis whose main victims would be socially fragile people.”

After having to face rising costs at several levels and being prevented from passing them all to their customers, cleaning companies would face massive job losses. The state and local authorities (which represent 25 per cent of the market) would then have to take cleaning operations in-house.

This in turn would have serious consequences - there would be a considerable rise in public expenditure, a lowering of professional standards of the cleaning trade, a loss of know-how and techniques, a deleterious effect in terms of public health, hygiene and the living conditions of the French people.

This is how Philippe Jouanny sees it: “At a time when technological innovation (such as the use of robots and artificial intelligence) is speeding up, when online platforms are getting ever more popular as a means of reducing costs, do we really want to kill off the ordinary worker in a conventional enterprise? I refuse to accept such a level of social and economic disruption for workers and companies operating in the cleaning sector. This government project is destabilising, dangerous and unjust. It is imperative that it’s revised and negotiated, and a planned implementation timetable put in place - in a spirit of cooperation. The very survival of cleaning companies and their workers is at stake.”