One in Three French Households Struggles to Pay for Gas or Electricity: The Cold as Shock Absorber

According to franceinfo, which cites the energy ombudsman's barometer (le baromètre du médiateur de l'énergie), one French person in three has had trouble paying their gas or electricity bills over the past twelve months. The direct consequence: nearly three households in four decided to turn down the heating at home last winter, in an attempt to spend less. That is what we know. The rest of this article is our reading.

The report does not say who, in those households, sorted, calculated, gave up. It does not specify the incomes of the households concerned or how tasks are divided within couples. We therefore have no figures on women. But we can ask the awkward question: when the heating drops a notch, who absorbs the difference?

Turning down the thermostat does not erase the need for warmth. It moves it. Children have to be dressed in layers, an extra kettle has to be boiled, the lingering cold has to be watched over, someone has to stay home to mind the little one who is coughing, and washing has to be dried somewhere other than a room that is too cold. None of this work appears on any bill or in any GDP figure. This is what we call, along with others, social reproduction: everything that makes and sustains people rather than commodities. When costs rise, the system does not eliminate this work. It hands it down to households, and in practice most often to women, who already do the greater part of it, paid or unpaid.

The cold is here a shock absorber. Energy prices climb, wages do not always keep pace, and it is the living room that takes the hit. This is called "sobriety" when you are in government or on a well-heated television studio set. In the poorly insulated kitchen of a tenant, it means making choices one did not choose.

There is a bitter irony in watching the same woman, a cashier, care assistant or cleaner, work all day for employers who count every hour, then come home and count every degree. Kollontai noted more than a century ago that capitalism made women wage earners without lightening their burden as housekeepers and mothers. Replace the factory with the supermarket checkout, and the sentence still holds, with the Linky smart meter thrown in.

One French person in three is not a marginal anomaly. It is an entire part of the country for whom heating has become an expense to be negotiated. The trade unions raise the question through wages, and they are right: without pay rises, the bill remains a tax on the most modest. But the question goes beyond the payslip. Who should pay to keep homes habitable: households, or those who profit from the energy being sold?

What we do not yet know: the share of these households living in lasting precariousness, and what the government intends to do before the coming winter. In the meantime, the thermostat remains the poor person's weapon, and the jumper its budget.