For Competitiveness, All must Assume their Responsibilities: The Responsibility Pact in France and the Blurring of Categories

Faced with a persistent economic and social crisis, France seems incapable of putting its public finances on a healthy footing, restoring the competitiveness of its enterprises, rethinking its social model and reducing its endemic unemployment rate. The recent Social-Democratic turn of its government and the “Responsibility Pact” proposal made to French companies by the President are no doubt symptomatic of one of the most serious evils from which, in the view of Jacques Bichot, the country is suffering: namely, the confusion of roles and responsibilities. Evidence of this, contends Bichot, comes from the fact that the smooth operation of markets –the labour market or the market for goods and services– is hampered by the interventions of a state that is itself incapable of properly organizing the functions allotted to it, whether these be its role of exercising sovereign authority or standing as guarantor of last resort for a welfare state that has substituted itself for functions that ought to be fulfilled by collective, social, contribution-based insurance. Emblematic of this imbroglio, in Jacques Bichot’s view, is the divergent understanding of the cost of labour which, as the employees see it, equates with net wages, whereas, from the employers’ point of view, it is gauged by total wage costs, the gap between the two being made up by the sum of social contributions determined by a third party, the state. Jacques Bichot recommends that the different roles should not be blurred and that everyone’s responsibilities should be clarified, particularly the responsibilities of companies, which have to define their strategies in terms of competitiveness and employment, and the –quite distinct– responsibilities of the state. And he argues here, for example, for the establishment of a “truthful [i.e. transparent] payslip”.