Minimum wage: at Matignon, the price of labour gets put on the table

According to franceinfo, the Smic (France's statutory minimum wage) should be raised, but the size of the increase remains to be determined. Everything will be on the table on Monday at Matignon, the prime minister's offices, at a social conference where raising low wages is among the central demands. On Friday 6 November, the broadcaster gathered views at a horse transport firm in the Yvelines, where bosses and workers do not agree. The dispatch we have does not detail the figures under consideration, nor the precise positions of those attending the conference: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Franceinfo's headline quotes a worker: "I need more money". The sentence is admirably clear, and that is precisely why it unsettles. In the everyday vocabulary of economic debate, one speaks instead of "pressure on margins" or "the cost of labour", as though the wage were a nuisance that fell from the sky. Yet a wage is the price of labour power: what it takes for someone to find housing, eat, get around and turn up for work the next day. When prices rise, this cost of reproduction rises too. The real question on Monday is therefore a simple one: who absorbs inflation? The worker, by cutting back on spending, or the employer, by cutting into profit?

This is where the quarrel becomes instructive. A wage covers the reproduction of the capacity to work, but the work delivered exceeds the time needed to produce that value. The remainder, surplus value, feeds profit. Any rise in the Smic therefore shifts, at the margin, the balance of that division. That the owner of a small firm worries about it is hardly surprising, nor cruel: he is himself caught up in competition, rents, and clients comparing prices. It is the structure that sets interests against one another, not temperaments. Still, that small firm is not the whole economy, and one would like to know where the margins are going elsewhere.

Let us also keep an eye on the argument lying in wait: an increase that is too large would "destroy jobs". It assumes a reserve of unemployed people waiting at the door, ready to fill the posts. This reserve army of labour serves precisely as discipline: as long as it exists, the wage claim is murmured rather than voiced. The argument will no doubt be brandished on Monday; we have not yet seen whether it has been.

Finally, let us be wary of formulations in which "the Smic" or "inflation" act alone, like natural forces. Behind every figure there are decisions: those of companies setting their prices, of the state arbitrating, of social partners negotiating. On Monday, at Matignon, no one will be discussing a meteorological phenomenon, but who pays for what. The question is whether anyone in the room will dare to put it that way.