Minimum wage: fourteen years without a boost, and the bill shows up on the payslip

According to Le Monde Économie, the government has raised the prospect of a revaluation of the smic, France's minimum wage, in response to social mobilisation. In a column for the daily, economist Clément Carbonnier points out that the minimum wage has not received a coup de pouce, a discretionary top-up above the automatic inflation indexation, in fourteen years, and that its recipients have grown poorer relative to the country as a whole. The column's headline: it would take more than 130 euros of monthly increase, for a full-time worker, just to get back to the 2012 level. We do not have the details of his calculations here, nor what the government would concretely cost out: the "piste" remains a piste, a mere option.

What follows is our reading, not the column's.

First, a point of vocabulary. We readily say that the smic "evolves" or that wages "adjust", as if the payslip were a weather phenomenon. But a coup de pouce is a decision: fourteen years without one is fourteen years of choices, made by successive governments. What market commentators call the "nature of things" has signatories here. This is what the Marxist tradition calls fetishism: we attribute agency to numbers, and withdraw it from those who set them.

Next, the question of who gets what. On this reading, the wage covers the cost of reproducing the labour force; the rest of the working day produces surplus value, the source of profit. A minimum wage that drifts away from the rest of the country means that a share of the value created mechanically shifts, without anyone needing to be cruel: the relationship alone is enough. Catching up with 2012 would therefore only return what has slipped; it would not be a conquest, merely a partial repayment, without interest.

There is also the mechanism that explains the usual caution. Marx described the industrial reserve army, that pool of unemployed and underemployed workers, as the pivot on which labour supply and demand turn: it confines the law within limits "convenient" for exploitation (our translation, Capital, Volume I, chapter 25). As long as that pool exists, low-wage earners have little means of bargaining on their own, and the state, through the smic, is one of the few collective levers available. That the government moves only after social mobilisation says a great deal: the revaluation comes from the street, not from a spontaneous movement of the market.

Should we then be enthusiastic? Not quite. A rise of 130 euros would not alter the split between wages and profits across the country; it would correct a drift. The real questions, which the column does not settle on the basis of what we know of it, are those of employers, who will demand compensation, and of the effect on wages just above the smic. Fourteen years of freeze is a long time. Catching up in one go looks less like a gift than like a final settlement.