French minimum wage (SMIC) and social anger, Digi Mart USA News (France): A social conference convened on Monday, November 9 by Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu will decide whether to grant an exceptional boost to the SMIC, the French minimum wage. The minimum wage is among the demands of protesters, social partners and some political parties, including LFI, which proposes a SMIC of 2,000 euros.
Given inflation, a new increase could be approved despite strong opposition from employers and the right.
The minimum wage is 71 years old. Before the SMIC, France had the SMIG, the guaranteed interprofessional minimum wage, established by the law of February 11, 1950.
Its primary goal was to restore freedom of wage negotiation, including collective bargaining, since wages had been frozen by the state since 1939.
To prevent this restored freedom from producing wages that were too low, the same law set a minimum based on a 45-hour working week and calculated on a typical household basket of goods. The basket varied by region, since the cost of living was central to the calculation, and it was higher in Paris than in the provinces.
From 1952, faced with galloping inflation linked to soaring raw material prices, the SMIG was indexed to prices. In 1968, the distinction between zones disappeared.
May 1968 brought mounting employee grievances: collective agreements were unequal, youth unemployment began to rise, strikes multiplied, and wage inequalities grew. On May 27, 1968, the Grenelle agreements led to a 35% increase in the SMIG and a 10% increase in other wages.
Under the Chaban-Delmas government and the presidency of Pompidou, it was noted that the SMIG had not fulfilled its role as a tool of social cohesion, leaving aside a segment of workers who had not benefited from growth. As a result, the law of January 2, 1970 replaced the G in SMIG with a C for croissance (growth), creating the interprofessional minimum growth wage (SMIC), indexed both to prices and to the growth rate of the economy, meaning the evolution of the average wage.
The SMIC rose significantly between 1970 and 1981. Then, amid very high inflation (averaging 13% per year), the Socialist government of François Mitterrand decided in 1982 to freeze wages and prices for several months and to index the SMIC to the inflation rate rather than to price increases.
As a result, until 1990 the purchasing power of minimum-wage earners eroded. The government then moved to reduce the charges weighing on these workers.
In 1994, an attempt to introduce a youth minimum wage provoked an uproar, and the project was withdrawn. In 1997, the Jospin government reduced the working week from 39 to 35 hours, mechanically raising the SMIC by 11%.
To smooth this effect, a new SMIC was created each July 1 until 2002, at one point producing as many as five different minimum wages. In 2002, the Fillon government set out the terms for a gradual return to a single SMIC by 2005.
Until 2009, the SMIC was revalued every year on July 1. Since 2010, it has been revalued on January 1 and, if necessary, during the year depending on inflation.
An automatic increase provided by the Labour Code is triggered when inflation for the most modest households exceeds 2% since the previous increase.
In recent years, this mechanism has been activated several times to offset inflation linked to international tensions: +2.2% in October 2021 (post-Covid), +2.6% in May 2022 (war in Ukraine), and +2.4% in June 2026 (war in the Middle East).
According to the latest INSEE survey in 2021, the SMIC concerned 2.04 million employees, about 12% of salaried employment as of January 1, 2021. Among SMIC earners, 59.3% were women, 24.1% worked in companies with fewer than 10 employees, and 34.6% worked part time (data as of January 1, 2021).
The share of SMIC earners is also higher in some sectors. In hotels and restaurants, 37% of employees earn the SMIC.
In contrast, in sectors such as gas, electricity and water production, or information and communication, fewer than 3% of workforce members earn the SMIC.
