France: Deal is reached on forward-looking management of jobs and skills

The draft accord reached in December describes GPEC as beneficial for both employers and employees. GPEC’s aim is to “anticipate foreseeable developments in jobs, careers, skills and qualifications, linked to foreseeable economic, demographic and technological changes” in the light of companies’ strategies. This should enable companies to improve their “dynamism and competitiveness” and give employees the “information and tools they need to be actors in their own career development either within the company or in the context of external mobility”. Employees should be given the means to deal with changes in jobs and skill requirements throughout their working lives, helping to make their career paths more secure.

GPEC requires efforts to predict future developments and the “upstream” sharing of information on change. These forecasts should be matched against the workforce’s current skill profile, enabling it to be managed and employees’ careers to be developed (inside or outside the company). All employees should be able to progress by at least one level of qualification during their working life. Particular attention should be paid to employees who are most at risk of losing their jobs and those with most difficulty in finding a stable job. Skills and job developments within the company should be seen in the broader context of such developments in the whole industry or geographical area concerned.

A company’s GPEC approach should be formulated and implemented through social dialogue and consultation. It should be a collective initiative allowing the development and implementation of individual measures. The draft agreement seeks to mobilise existing tools and create new ones, and to “link them dynamically in an active approach to anticipation”. It aims to reinforce the usefulness and implementation of GPEC in those companies that are obliged to negotiate on the issue, and to encourage other companies to take similar measures.

While accepting that there is no single way of implementing GPEC, the draft accord states that it involves a certain number of essential stages and collective and individual measures, summarised below.

The introduction of GPEC requires a “qualitative and quantitative diagnosis” of employment, occupations and skills in the company. This diagnosis, which should be conducted using both collective and individual methods, allows the current situation to be assessed and matched with the company’s future development and needs. To predict these needs, the company should draw up forecasts based on its strategic plans and the foreseeable effects of technological, demographic and economic change, both internally and in its industrial and geographical environment.

The diagnosis should map current jobs, occupations and skills throughout the company (by site, department and employee category) and assess which occupational areas are growing and declining. It should look at what skills are transferable between jobs and parts of the company, and how employees can move between occupations and careers.

To help with the diagnosis, companies should use information they have already collected for other purposes, such as the “social balance sheet” on the employment situation that larger companies are obliged to produce every year, or the compulsory company report on the relative situation of women and men.

The overall picture provided by a company-wide jobs and skills diagnosis should be fleshed out by an individual diagnosis for each employee. This should be based largely on the “professional development assessment” (bilan d'étape professionnel) scheme introduced by the January 2008 cross-industry agreement on labour market modernisation.

The individual diagnosis should give employees a clear picture of their skills, enabling them to identify their hopes for their career development and the possibilities for occupational mobility, while giving the employer information about skill levels and needs. The assessment is aimed at making employees “actors in their own career development”, engaging them in the development of their skills and qualifications and helping them to build their career paths.

All employees with at least two years’ service should be offered a professional development assessment every five years. In the year following the assessment, the employee and employer must decide how to put its conclusions into effect, for example through training and mobility measures. The assessment should be separate from other evaluation and guidance interviews and processes carried out by employers.

The details of the individual diagnosis process will be agreed by a working party set up by the signatories of the national agreement.

To put GPEC into effect, on the basis of the above diagnosis, companies should develop an articulated and coherent mix of actions, notably involving:

• measures relating to vocational training;
• measures relating to employees’ occupational and geographical mobility;
• changes to work organisation;
• recruitment policies;
• existing measures based on company or sectoral collective agreements, for example relating to equality, diversity and the employment of older workers; and
• existing tools aimed at identifying skills and qualifications needs in the company’s sector.

While GPEC affects all employees, priority should be given to those who are most at risk of losing their jobs and those with most difficulty in finding a stable job. Measures should therefore:

• pay particular attention to the employees most exposed to the consequences of economic or technological changes, and notably those in occupations that are in decline;
• improve “age management” in respect of the position of older and young workers;
• take into account gender equality aspects; and
• contribute to a “responsible use of contracts”, including part-time contracts.

The draft agreement promotes the involvement of trade unions and employee representatives in drawing up and implementing GPEC in companies.

In those companies with 300 or more employees that are legally obliged to negotiate on GPEC, the draft agreement states that matters dealt with in the negotiations should include: the creation of joint committees to oversee GPEC; the ways of involving elected employee representatives and workplace trade union delegates in the GPEC process; and methods of following up GPEC initiatives. Employers with GPEC agreements should consult unions and inform employee representatives on the ways in which the workforce will be made aware of the agreement’s provisions and of the forecast changes in jobs and skills.

Companies with fewer than 300 employees that wish to introduce GPEC in cooperation with their employees are encouraged to draw inspiration from the national agreement, and will be given information on the issue by sectoral employers’ bodies.

The involvement of employee representative bodies, notably works councils, is described by the draft agreement as a “determining factor” in the success of GPEC, given their statutory role of receiving information on the company’s overall situation and on employment and training matters. They should also be involved in the implementation of GPEC measures.

Trade unions and employers’ organisations at sector level are obliged by law to negotiate on GPEC every three years, and all sectors have “joint national employment committees” that conduct research and recommend policies on training and employment matters. Sectors therefore have a major role to play in GPEC, the draft agreement states, in terms of information, encouragement and support.

The sectoral social partners should help implement GPEC by providing companies, employees and employee representatives with data on technological and demographic change, industrial policy and skills and qualification needs. They should also:

• address specific information to individual employers to persuade them of the benefits of GPEC;
• develop simple, practical guides and handbooks on GPEC, adapted to companies of all sizes;
• alert small and medium-sized companies to the schemes and financial assistance available to support GPEC; and
• follow up and evaluate developments in their sector, and disseminate good practice, especially to help small and medium-sized companies.

The draft agreement provides for social partner organisations at regional and departmental level to conduct and disseminate research into economic developments and changes in skills and jobs in their geographical area. They should also provide information on GPEC to companies and employees, and share good practice. This support should be targeted especially at small and medium-sized companies. Further, the social partners at this level should encourage experiments in introducing common GPEC initiatives involving separate companies that are part of the same production chain.

At national cross-industry level, the social partners will set up an internet portal giving companies and employees access to the relevant research and information gathered at sectoral and regional/department level.

The draft agreement states that “while GPEC should take account of the future prospects of occupations (those that are growing, stable, declining, undergoing major change in their content or demographic renewal), it should not be a tool that favours collective redundancies”. Conceived in this way, GPEC is therefore not a stage prior to collective redundancy procedures and plans to safeguard employment (plans de sauvegarde de l’emploi, PSEs). These procedures and plans are governed by specific rules, and their management should be dissociated from GPEC. A GPEC initiative, “conducted in the spirit and under the conditions of” the draft agreement, should allow employment to be consolidated and “better equip employees confronted by restructuring”.

This clause dissociating GPEC from collective redundancy procedures and PSEs is the most contentious part of the draft accord. The background is that companies with at least 50 employees that intend to make 10 or more employees redundant over a period of a month are obliged to draw up a PSE, which should seek to avoid or reduce the redundancies through measures such as redeployment, retraining and reorganisation of working time. A number of recent court rulings have suspended or ruled null and void PSEs in some companies with 300 or more employees that have failed to meet their obligation to negotiate on GPEC.

Medef, the main employers’ confederation, is worried by these rulings and wants to send out a clear message that GPEC and PSEs/redundancy procedures are separate, especially in the hope of dissuading the Cour de cassation (France’s supreme court) from confirming the judgments of the lower courts. In the January 2008 cross-industry labour market modernisation agreement, Medef succeeded in including a statement that GPEC should be “completely dissociated” from the management of redundancies and PSEs. It now wants to reinforce this in the new GPEC agreement and has insisted that the above formulation be included in the draft text.

With job losses mounting in the current economic downturn, some trade unions are unhappy at the separation of GPEC and PSEs/redundancy procedures, and this is likely to be a key consideration in their decisions on whether or not to ratify the GPEC agreement. While the CFE-CGC and CFDT union confederations are not particularly worried about the statement in the draft agreement, FO and CFTC are unhappy with the employers’ attempts to contradict case law making the validity of redundancy plans dependent on prior GPEC negotiations. The CGT confederation is most strongly opposed, seeing the clause as giving companies that have not tried to anticipate future employment developments a “blank cheque” to make redundancies.

Even if the agreement is signed with its current wording on GPEC and redundancies, employment law experts argue that it will have no legal effect to prevent the courts from continuing to link the two. However, the clause would send out a political message, particularly to the Cour de cassation.

Medef hopes that at least three of the five union confederations will sign the agreement. None has yet made a formal commitment to do so, but several have stated that the text contains “notable advances”.

This article is based on material provided by Christophe Boulay, European Employment Review correspondent for France.