Youth unemployment at 21.6%: they're negotiating, but for whom, and at whose expense?

According to Le Monde, unions and employers are starting negotiations on youth employment, in a tense autumn for social dialogue. The unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds hit 21.6% in the second quarter, up 2.5 points over one year. Still according to Le Monde, the successive governments of Emmanuel Macron have multiplied schemes to tackle the problem, but France remains well behind several of its European partners. What we don't yet know is what employers will put on the table, or what the unions will win. What follows is our reading.

Let's start in the kitchen. Youth unemployment above 21% is not just a curve: it's a 22-year-old son moving back into his childhood bedroom, a mother stretching the dinner, a rent that cannot be paid alone. When jobs are scarce and support remains modest, the cost of maintaining a generation does not vanish. It slides onto families, and first onto those already doing the invisible work: cooking, supporting, housing, worrying. Economists call this social reproduction. We say: someone always pays, and it is not the companies' balance sheet.

Second angle: the function of unemployment itself. A reserve of available labour, young, ready to accept an internship, a short contract or involuntary part-time work, weighs on every wage. The boss does not need to want it: the threat is in the air, and it disciplines those who have a job as much as those looking for one. Scheme after scheme, what has mostly been lowered is the cost of hiring young people. One may ask, without presuming the outcome of these discussions, whether we are treating unemployment or simply managing it on the cheap.

This is where the negotiating table becomes interesting. The unions defend the price and conditions of work: wages, duration, contract stability. This is necessary, and the moment reminds us of it. But this struggle targets the effects, not the machine that manufactures insecurity. Facing them, employers negotiate with a major asset: an abundance of candidates. The balance of power is not even when one young person in five is looking for work.

Finally, there is a blind spot these negotiations may mention in passing: housing, health, transport, everything that lets a young person stay on their feet between two contracts. Without that, the best integration scheme looks like a ladder set on sand.

We will therefore watch what is decided there, and above all who is heard. The young people concerned are not always at the table. Yet they are the first to know the price of rent, of the metro ticket and of the three-month fixed-term contract.