Sick pay: a billion to save, and the worker foots the bill

According to Le Monde, the government and social partners are negotiating a structural reform of sick leave, with a target set in advance: one billion euros in savings. Still according to the paper, unions and employers' organisations fear truncated debates on working hardship (pénibilité) and working conditions. What we don't yet know: which precise measures are on the table, and who would be hit first. The rest is our reading.

Let's start with the order of things. First you fix the figure, then you look for where to find it. This is not a discussion about workplace health; it is an accounting exercise with partners invited to sit around the table. When the amount comes before the diagnosis, the question "why are people getting sick?" becomes a second-tier topic.

Yet a sick leave is first and foremost the symptom of work that wears people down. The back of the care assistant, the knees of the warehouse worker, the nerves of the cashier: these costs do not vanish because you move them out of the Social Security budget (Sécurité sociale, France's state health and welfare system). They change address. If benefits shrink, the bill does not evaporate; it lands on the employee, who loses income, or who comes to work sick, which has never cured anyone.

This is where the notion of social reproduction becomes very concrete. The system rests on work that produces and repairs people: caring, feeding, raising, watching over. The conceptual notes from La Gazette sum it up this way: when you cut into health and care, that work does not stop; it is passed on to households. A worse-paid sick leave means a patient who rests less, and often a woman who absorbs the extra load: looking after the child, supporting the parent, keeping the house running while the wage slips. All of it without a single line in the accounts.

The image that comes to mind is a kitchen table at the end of the month. On it lie the payslip, trimmed by a few waiting days or by clawed-back allowances, and the calendar of medical appointments. Nobody at Bercy (the shorthand for the French finance ministry) ever sees that table. Yet it is the last shock absorber for every saving drive.

Employers are not in a simple position, and neither are the unions: the former fear the cost of absenteeism, the latter a debate reduced to hunting down fraudsters. But union struggles over pay and conditions, our notes remind us, deal with effects more than with root causes. Here the stake is precisely not to let the effect, the sick leave, mask the cause: the pace of work, hardship on the job, the way work is organised.

If the reform truly wants to be "structural", it will start where work makes people ill, not with the reimbursement slip. Otherwise, it will be a billion saved on one side, and a billion more quietly carried by those who are already holding everything else up.