Decree on sanctions against RSA recipients: the National Council for Policies to Combat Poverty calls for a moratorium

"We're moving from a situation of distress to one of great distress. If I hadn't had my family, I would have become homeless," says a woman who lived through the withdrawal of the active solidarity income (RSA) for a year. With the testimony of a member of its fifth college, bringing together people in precarious and poverty-stricken situations who make up half of its 65 members, the National Council for Policies to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion (CNLE) concludes its latest opinion on the so-called full employment law passed in December 2023.

In this text devoted to the draft decree detailing the new sanctions regime planned for RSA beneficiaries , the body, placed under the Prime Minister and chaired by sociologist Nicolas Duvoux, reiterates "its opposition in principle to the spirit and letter of the law for full employment" and reiterates its request for a moratorium on this text that the government intends to publish from June 1. A new sanction would then be created, called "remobilization suspension" , which can be activated as soon as the first "breach" is noted and, with it, the possibility of suspending or removing 30 to 100% of this allowance.

These new rules, promoted in exchange for better support, would reduce the unemployment rate by facilitating the integration of the most precarious, hammered the four successive governments which have defended this system in turn: that of Elisabeth Borne who imagined it when the promise of full employment still punctuated the speeches of the executive, that of Gabriel Attal who was on the point of publishing this decree when the dissolution was decided, that of Michel Barnier who worked on its modalities then that of François Bayrou who is preparing to publish it.

These new rules will only increase poverty, considers, on the contrary, the CNLE, especially since the strengthening of support is long overdue. "Far from introducing graduation or a balancing of the current sanctions regime, [this] risks weakening access to rights for the target groups by multiplying the sanctions, made easier by the absence of protections currently governing sanctions, and thereby contributing to the increase in non-use of rights and poverty," writes the Council in its opinion.

Placing job seekers and RSA recipients and applicants, who have been automatically registered with their spouses with France Travail since January 1st, on the same level, mixes two frameworks of support, notes the council, one based "on a contributory insurance logic" , the other "on national solidarity" . "Such an assimilation would risk ignoring the social inequalities, particularly in health, faced by certain groups, and placing on the latter the responsibility for failings that are more due to structural factors" , it fears. And since the best support has not materialized, the body fears that the pressures will be greater both on recipients and on professionals, which would increase "the probability of manifestations of institutional mistreatment of recipients on the one hand, and professional burnout and loss of meaning in the work of professionals on the other hand". Not to mention that recent years have shown that a drop in unemployment does not necessarily mean a reduction in poverty.

The CNLE has drawn up a list of provisions of this decree, on which the Council of State will rule in the coming days, which it considers problematic from a legal point of view. In particular, it considers this "new system of sanctions to be contradictory with the preamble to the 1946 Constitution, reiterated in 1958, and its reference to adequate means of subsistence", and reiterates its recommendation to establish a minimum income. It also points out the "risk of breaches of equality before the law in light of the methods by which local authorities will take up this decree" . It also underlines that the appeal period, reduced from thirty to only ten days, "is very largely insufficient" , deplores the fact that the first sanction is "not subject to examination by a multidisciplinary team", and considers "the absence of the possibility for a beneficiary to benefit again from the benefit upon compliance with their obligations" to be contradictory to respect for fair law.

When, in the summer of 2023, former Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne assured that she wanted, through this reform, to "reconnect with the spirit of the RMI" implemented under Michel Rocard in 1988, by allowing "everyone to have enough to live on while at the same time being supported towards employment" , the CNLE had an opposite reading. It sees it as the extension of a "dynamic of reversing the responsibility of the community towards deprived populations into individual responsibility for people in poverty", and an "imbalance which breaks, in a more radical way, with the educational and balanced spirit of the RMI integration contract" . It remains to be seen what the Bayrou government will do with the Council's request for a moratorium, which it referred to this draft decree even though this consultation was not mandatory.