Anti-poverty plan in France: Castex targets integration, associations get annoyed
The Prime Minister, Jean Castex, with the Minister of Labor, Elisabeth Borne (right) in Épinay-sur-Orge, details the measures of the anti-poverty plan.
Alain JOCARD / AFP
Text by: RFI Follow
6 min
In France, the government announced this Saturday, October 24 new measures in favor of the most precarious, for more than 700 million euros.
While traveling to an Emmaus emergency accommodation center in Épinay-sur-Orge, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, focused his intervention on integration through work.
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The government had already announced, over the past two weeks, monetary support for the most vulnerable, at a cost of 1.1 billion euros.
There will be 150 euros for recipients of active solidarity income (RSA) and for long-term unemployed.
There will be 100 euros per child for beneficiaries of housing assistance.
This will be 150 euros which will also be allocated to young people who receive housing assistance and scholarship students, or 1.3 million young people in total.
In an Emmaus emergency accommodation center, in Épinay-sur-Orge, in Essonne, Prime Minister Jean Castex detailed new measures to encourage integration through employment.
He announced that “
30,000 additional positions in the structures of integration through economic activity (IAE) will be created by 2022
”.
These positions "
will be added to the 240,000
which is our objective by the end of the five-year term
", he continued.
Extend the time spent in integration structures
“
We are going to extend the time spent in these structures for integration through economic activity by 12 months, because we know very well that in times of unemployment and difficulties, leaving is more difficult.
So we are going to take this situation into account for a maximum of 24 months to also avoid what are called dry exits of the IAE,
”he added.
►Also read: Poverty: the Castex announcements postponed after the assassination of a professor
At the same time, the government intends to strengthen access to housing and emergency accommodation.
"
We are also going to open 1,500 new accommodation places, especially for women leaving maternity and who have no solutions because it is a subject that associations have particularly pointed out to us
".
Jean Castex has also announced the opening of the winter campaign to help the homeless from October 18, two weeks in advance.
Insufficient announcements for associations
The anti-poverty associations immediately criticized the insufficiency of these announcements, regretting that the government still refuses to increase social minima.
For Christophe Devys, who chairs the Alerte collective grouping together 35 national solidarity federations and associations, these measures are certainly “
welcome
”.
But the government remains, according to him, camped on an "
ideological position
", by refusing to increase the social minima, to prefer aid to integration through employment.
This revaluation, he stressed, is all the more necessary as the RSA now only reaches 39% of the minimum wage, against 50% in 1988, when the RMI was created, the ancestor of the RSA.
The reaction of ATD Fourth World, member of the Alert collective, was even sharper, in the face of "band
aid measures, disconnected from people's lives
".
According to this association, the choices of the executive are the result of "
contempt
" and "
hackneyed logic of opposing the" good poor ", who would be given a boost to help them find the market. jobs, and the “bad poor”, to whom we would distribute crumbs
”.
Poverty increases with coronavirus
Poverty has worsened with the health crisis.
Associations estimate the population at one million who plunged below the poverty line with confinement in the spring.
These new faces of precariousness which is added to the 9 million poor people who already exist in the country.
It is a new population that they are seeing scrolling through since confinement, especially many young people.
These are students and temporary workers whose missions have been cut short.
But there are autoentrepreneurs, too, forced by the collapse of activity to ask for social minimums to live.
In total, there are a million people, therefore, whose income does not exceed 1000 euros per month.
According to associations, the number of beneficiaries of food aid has jumped by around 30% in France.
Requests for the 10% RSA.
And it is not over since the already overwhelmed associations fear hundreds of thousands of other requests with the job losses to come.
The Banque de France anticipates unemployment at 11% in January.
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