“Today, everyone asked me for a contractual breakup”: these bosses who understand that the government wants to cut the tap (and these unions that are protected)

The government is looking for savings where you can find them. In the social component, the Minister of Labor wants social partners to discuss another unemployment insurance reform to circumscribe the number of eligible people and reduce their compensation duration.

But the government also wants to address conventional ruptures, whose number has increased in recent years. This system created in 2008 allows the employer and the employee to break by mutual agreement a permanent contract. In this case, the employee receives compensation and can benefit from the unemployment allocation.

It is this last point that bothers the government, because it weighs public finances. François Bayrou presented a plan to achieve almost 44 billion savings to reduce the public deficit.

“Many abuses”

The Labor Minister even believes that there are “objectively many abuses, in the employee as on the commercial side.” On the employers’ side, the entourage of Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet specifies that it can be “disguised as’ disguised ‘in conventional ruptures.”

In this way, the company is eliminated from the obligations that can fall on it during a work protection plan, for example, “trying to order employees, to inject money into the local employment basin or financial training actions.”

On the employee’s side, there may also be abuses, according to the Ministry of Labor, with “disguised resignations” such as conventional ruptures with sometimes a job search that does not begin after the cessation of previous employment. “

“All who want to leave ask me for a contractual break”

In the field, this observation is corroborated by Philippe Véran, head of a company of 1,000 employees for manufacturing implants and dental prostheses. “We really appreciate this tool because it allows you to have clarity, to ensure separation, the employee cannot dispute the contractual breakup, as is the case of dismissal,” he explains.

But he believes that the spirit of the system was diverted: “At the beginning, employees were thought for those who were bad in the company.”

“When it comes to someone who has been in business for a long time and who has a real concern, I understand, but some have been there and who just want to give up to change my life,” he said.

“Before, there could be dramas”

On the union side, we refute this observation. “When you request a contractual break, it is not going well in the company. Otherwise, we are waiting to find a job and give up,” says Vanessa Jereb, undersecretary of UNSA.

The trade unionist praises instead of the system merits: “Conventional ruptures have allowed the outputs to fluidize, this made it possible to avoid conflicting situations, employers actually acclaim them,” he says.

In fact, some employers could press an employee to resign and, on the contrary, an employee could make sure to be fired instead of giving up. The Conventionnstra ruptures allowed us to avoid a certain number of judgments in the industrial court.

The government wants to cut the tap

Given the increase in the number of conventional ruptures signed, which increased from 88,000 in the first quarter of 2015 to 128,000 in the first quarter of 2025, the government asked social partners to find an agreement to limit their effect on public finances.

In theory, there are several possibilities: modify the conditions of access to the contractual termination (employee profile, company profile …) or to receive compensation conditions from the work of France (amount of the allocation, deadlines before compensation (deficiency), duration of compensation …). The Ministry specifies that no track is privileged at this stage and that the issue will be subject to negotiations among social couples.