Senators have tried it, will Medef succeed in creating it, and above all in getting it accepted? The idea of creating a “Senior permanent contract” appears in a preliminary draft agreement sent on March 18 to employee unions as part of negotiations on a “new pact for life at work”.
As part of the pension reform, senators proposed making such a contract legal. In particular, this involved reducing certain contributions to encourage the employment of people aged 60 and over. However, in April 2023, the Constitutional Council censored this proposal for rather formal reasons, considering that such a measure did not have to appear in the Social Security budget.
Almost a year later, in February 2024, employers brought out this project during negotiations with the Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises.
According to the Medef project, detailed in particular by Capital, this employment contract would be called “end of career” permanent contract? It would be open to those aged 60 and over, or even younger if sector agreements permitted, registered with France Travail (formerly the Employment Centre). It would be possible for the employer to terminate the contract upon retirement from the moment the employee has reached 67 years of age or has worked the sufficient number of quarters to leave without reduction. Also, the employee would have the obligation to transmit their expected full-time departure date to their future employer when signing their employment contract.
The benefit for the company? Benefit from an exemption from the 30% contribution payable upon retirement.
Among the other specificities of this project is also the possibility of rehiring, with a waiting period. In short: if the employer wishes to dismiss you in order to offer you a Senior CDI, he must wait 6 months before being able to rehire you, but it would be possible. Medef also proposes creating an interim permanent contract based on this model. He would replace the current senior fixed-term contract.
This project displeases the unions. The CFDT, the CGT, Force Ouvrière, the CFE-CGC and the CFTC say in fact “to oppose the senior permanent contract, which gives the right to new exemptions from contributions for the benefit of companies”, in a joint press release. Union representatives fear that this new version of the Senior CDI actually hides a pretext for dismissing employees who have reached full retirement age.