Purchasing power: have employees lost the game?

Companies, it’s up to you! This is the main message sent by Emmanuel Macron on France 2, Wednesday October 26, when he was asked about salaries. The Head of State ruled out any measure of indexation to inflation – that is to say an automatic increase in wages, to respond to the rise in prices. “ I don’t want to be demagoguehe launched. We are not in an administered economy. Wage increases are not decided by the state. […] Otherwise, we destroy jobs. »

His Minister of the Economy, too, throws the ball back to companies: “All those who can must raise wages”, Bruno Le Maire regularly repeats, without however arousing an echo among the bosses. It had been ages since a government had been confronted with such a problem: high inflation, which reduced purchasing power. After thirty years of near-stability, prices have jumped 6.2% in twelve months, with even sharper spikes in the essentials: food and energy… and the levers available to the State to act themselves are slim, apart from more or less targeted subsidies.

The winter shock is all the more brutal as neither the bosses nor the trade unionists had integrated these data when they had negotiated the last annual increases. Result: the first social conflicts broke out. In the refineries, of course, where strikes forced TotalEnergies to concede a 7% increase.