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Unemployment benefits =/= basic income

• bertil 8y ago
  Unemployment benefits (Chômage/Pôle Emploi) are only allocated to people actively looking for a job after they lost a previous job. They are typically 70-80% of your previous income and are granted for 2 years. It comes with monthly oversight and training program. Entrepreneurs are welcome to it and can ask to be given a lump sum and have dedicated training. RSA (Revenu de Soliarité Active) is given to anyone, based on their resources: young graduates without a first paying job, refugees waiting for immigration decision, people who haven’t found a job in more than two years, even unpaid members of religious orders. It comes with medical coverage (“universal” medical insurance is based on your status in France). Both are revoked when you find a job. It used to be possible that a part-time job would pay not much more than either stipend; because of that, both programs were described a possible “disincentives” by opponents (typically right-wing small-government, aka “Libéraux”). Even proponents saw a lot of edge-cases: people having to wait, seeing their hours cut or being fired soon after they changed status and struggling in the transition. To ease the transition, partial stipends were made possible.