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Unemployment, Jean-Luc Mélenchon

Unemployment, work period required to qualify for benefits: Repeal Macron's eligibility rules; entitlement from the first day of work

Direction of change: decrease, compared with current law.

The lever. Minimum period of work, over a reference period, required to receive unemployment benefit. Direction rule: ↑ longer work period required (more restricted access).

« Revenir sur les réformes Macron en abrogeant l’éligibilité et les méthodes de calcul du montant et de la durée de l’allocation pour indemniser les chômeurs en fonction de leurs derniers salaires grâce à une assurance calculée à partir du premier jour de travail »1

Translation by the editorsReverse the Macron reforms by repealing the eligibility rules and the methods for calculating the amount and duration of the benefit, so as to compensate the unemployed according to their latest wages through insurance calculated from the first day of work

Encoding

No cost-schedule parameter for this position: see the costing for the reason.

Costing

Announced by the candidate

not announced

The programme does not cost this measure.

Published costings

none

No external costing of this position recorded to date.

Our calculation

not costed

The repeal of the eligibility rules is counted in the repeal of the 2019-2021 reform, costed under the “Benefit amount and tapering” lever. Entitlement from the first day of work is not costed.

Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule

Current law. Qualifying for benefits requires 6 months of work (130 days or 910 hours) in the last 24 months, 36 months from age 55. This rule comes from Decree No. 2019-797 of 26 July 2019 and was renewed by the agreement of 15 November 2024. Before 2019: 4 months out of 28. Since 1 April 2026, first-time claimants (people who have received no benefit in the past 20 years) qualify with 5 months of work (108 days or 758 hours) in the last 24 or 36 months (Act No. 2025-989 of 24 October 2025, provisions approved by order of 28 March 2026): €100m in 2026, €130m per year once fully phased in from 2027 (Unédic).

Horizon. Full year, €bn per year, in 2021 euros

Limits. Derived from the Unédic estimate of March 2021: €0.8bn per year at steady state for raising the qualifying-employment condition from 4 to 6 months, divided by two months. Returning to 4 months out of 28 costs about €0.8bn. The 2021 figure is not updated: unemployment and the SMIC have changed since, and the 2023 countercyclicality reduces the duration of entitlements. Benchmark under 2026 law: lowering the condition by one month for first-time claimants only costs €0.13bn per year (Unédic), much less than the coefficient, which applies to all entrants. « Net » convention: Unédic presents its reduced spending for 2021 and 2023 together with the funding of claimants' supplementary pensions (a flow to Agirc-Arrco, between general government bodies); for the 2019-2021 reform, the share of this flow is not isolated and could not be removed.

How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.

This lever in the method · Costing for Jean-Luc Mélenchon

  1. L’Avenir en commun (édition 2025), p. 36. Open the document at this page.

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