Gas up 6.6%: heating is not a consumer product

According to franceinfo, three in four French people judge the cost of gas heating too high, based on a survey by the consumer association Que Choisir Ensemble. Invited on the channel on Sunday, Grégory Caret, director of the association's Observatoire de la consommation (consumer observatory), argues that "the state will have to step in to help with all this". The same day, the benchmark retail price of natural gas rose by 6.6%. The details of the survey and any measures under consideration are not in the material available to us: we will not invent them.

So much for the facts. What follows is our reading.

First, the vocabulary. A "benchmark price", a "consumer", a "survey": everything is designed to turn the cold into a matter for price comparison websites. Yet nobody chooses to consume heating the way they choose a yoghurt. We heat our homes so we can sleep, so the children can do their homework, so the body can get through the next day at the factory, the counter or the hospital. Heating forms part of what economists discreetly call the cost of reproducing the labour force: what it takes to go back to work tomorrow in decent shape.

And this is where the problem lies. Wages are supposed to cover that cost. When gas jumps 6.6% in a single Sunday and the pay packet does not budge an inch, the difference does not evaporate: it is absorbed by households. They cut back on something else, turn down the thermostat, put on an extra jumper. Productivity gains, for their part, have never been lost along the way by accident; they simply do not pass through the payslip. Nothing exceptional about that: it is the ordinary mechanics of the system, and there is no need to see in it the cruelty of any particular boss.

Domestic labour takes the hit too. When heating becomes a luxury, it is households, and most often women, who compensate: monitoring the temperature of rooms, keeping small children at home, nursing the colds that settle in. This burden appears in no price index.

The appeal to the state by Que Choisir Ensemble is therefore legitimate, but its logic needs spelling out. If aid is conceived in terms of "purchasing power" and targeted cheques, we treat the cold as a consumer accident. The Republic nonetheless promised everyone, in the preamble of 1946, decent conditions of existence. It does not say "subject to the gas market's prices". A right to a decent and affordable life requires looking towards wages, regulated prices and the renovation of housing, rather than handing out sticking plasters every November.

Someone will say this costs money. Certainly. But the cold also costs: it is paid for in health, in fatigue, in hours of life. And those, as usual, do not appear on the balance sheet.