Covid: partial unemployment for a year, employees looking for alternatives

Partial unemployment has become widespread for many employees over the past year.

Tourism, events and catering are particularly affected and some are considering retraining.

Business leaders are worried about this trend, as well as the dropouts of their employees.  

DECRYPTION

Some employees have been on partial unemployment for a year.

France will celebrate this week the first anniversary of the start of confinement decided to fight the health crisis linked to Covid.

On March 17, 2020, the entire country was in fact shut down and some have never been able to fully resume their activity.

In January, a little more than 2 million French employees were still on partial unemployment, that is to say one in ten employees.

A significant figure but far from the peak reached last April, during which more than 8.4 million people were concerned.

Today, the most affected sectors remain tourism, events and catering.

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Partial unemployment that has lasted for a year for some

The device has made it possible to limit the damage, since only 284,000 salaried jobs have been destroyed since the start of the crisis.

The catering sector is the sector which makes the most use of partial activity, nearly 60% of its employees are at a standstill and thanks to this device receive at least 84% of their net remuneration.

A guarantee that runs at least until April.

In the summer of 2020, levels fell very low when bars and restaurants were able to reopen but Ahmed, for example, has not worked a single day since March 15.

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At 36, he realized the importance of his work in his life.

He realized the "balance" that his job brought him.

This allowed him to "stand up for something".

According to him, the current situation is that we "get up, we do not know why, we are trying to find something to do".

The other essential aspect of his work, according to him, "is the social bond. We love this job and it's almost as if we love it even more", with this forced partial unemployment. 

The temptation to retrain

Ahmed is far from being an isolated case.

In the restaurant where he works, out of 23 employees, 20 are on short-time work.

Between early March 2020 and last February, 2.700 billion working hours were compensated for partial activity in France for a total of 28.8 billion euros shared between the State and Unédic.

Despite this aid, many employees have questioned themselves during this year.

The boss of Ahmed, Alain Fontaine, also expects a significant loss of his troops at the time of the recovery.

"I know there are some that I won't see again because their lives have changed. After a year of thinking they were like 'but wait, I can have my evenings and my weekends' and they may have taken other leads. And that is the problem with all French catering ", testifies the restaurateur. 

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The question of retraining has arisen for many employees.

Some have already changed direction, others are thinking about it.

Aymeric, stand designer for fairs and shows, has only worked a few days over the past year.

Faced with the crisis in his sector, he trained in artificial intelligence.

At 43, he plans to reorient himself but is apprehensive.

"I said to myself 'I'm going to retrain' but it's not the easiest age. But I'm quite flexible, I manage to adapt," wants to believe the forty-something.

But his eventual departure will not be without regrets: "I am in a job that I love, I fell into it 15 years ago and I can hardly see myself doing anything else. So I try to keep my optimism. that's what keeps me going ".

Bosses fear dropouts

More than retraining, it is dropouts that worry business leaders.

According to Fabrice Laborde, the boss of the Galicia group where Aymeric works, a quarter of his employees have completely disappeared in nature.

They no longer participate in information meetings, no longer call and the CEO admits to being a little distraught.

"We have experienced growth. We have managed the overflow of work all our professional life. We were trained in that, when we were hired. But we were never trained to manage the shortage and the void", explains the boss. 

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Faced with this unprecedented situation, "we found ourselves dealing psychologically with the absence of work, activity and meeting," he says. A transition that did not go smoothly. "We had some weaknesses on this, so we did it with the means at hand. We meet our employees quite frequently. Every 10 days maximum. We try to give as much information as possible and to keep the link", explains Fabrice Laborde. After more than a year of partial unemployment, the other fear also concerns the loss of skills and self-confidence of employees. Fabrice Laborde, for example, does not intend to wait for the formal resumption of the shows to restart the machine. We will have to get ahead, he says, in order to relearn how to work together.