Jacques Bichot is the author, and Arnaud Robinet the co-author, of the excerpts139 that the following argument comprises, developing what the first proposition of economic science 9.4 summarizes: The employer share of contributions assessed on wages is a damaging fiction.
“It is the worker who insures against the risk of having to pay for costly care, not the firm or the administration. We will observe this for each branch of social security: the existence of contributions partly borne by the employee and partly by the employer is a survival from the past. This relic no longer has any usefulness, any meaning, and it generates serious problems. In particular, it makes the functioning of the labor market problematic and conceals from employees the true price they end up paying for their social protection. The shift from the welfare state to genuine social insurance therefore includes the abolition of employer contributions.”140.
“The first reason [the] employer contributions must be abolished is that their existence blurs our perception of very important economic realities. Beginning with the remuneration of employees: is it the net wage, the gross wage, or the super-gross wage (the sum of the gross wage and employer contributions)? Many employees think it is their net wage, what is paid at month’s end into their bank account. The employment contract, for its part, sets the gross wage, on which employee contributions are withheld at source by the employer […]”142
“If the employee received in their bank account the entirety of their super-gross wage and directly paid the entirety of the social-insurance contributions owed (the sum of the present employee and employer shares), would the result not be exactly the same? Payment would generally be made by direct debit, as for many recurring bills […]; it would be clear that the remuneration of labor is the super-gross wage, and that the worker pays the totality of the social contributions.”143.
“The neutralization technique is simple: replace employer contributions with taxes whose proceeds will go to social security. It then becomes possible to raise the gross wage, the object of negotiations between employers and employees, more than the super-gross (the cost of labor), leaving it to the State to levy more on the net wage to finance the welfare state. If the public authorities fall into the trap […], the unpopularity falls on the governing officials rather than on the employers.”144
“The existence of employer contributions encourages unions to demand ever more social benefits, financed by these contributions, because they can make their members and other employees believe that this is the right way to obtain more from employers. The belief that the worker pays the employee contributions, and the firm the employer contributions, is fairly strong; it rests on a very visible fact: in the immediate term, the day after an increase in an employer contribution […], the net wage does not change, the additional cost falls entirely on the firms. This is as plain as the nose on one’s face.
“What is not seen is what comes afterward: the reinforced resistance that company managers put up against demands for increases in the gross wage. The econometric studies carried out on this phenomenon show that it takes about two years to erase the advantage initially obtained by employees from the fact that a contribution increase is borne by the employer rather than the employee. The benefit to employees is therefore entirely temporary. The damage to everyone, by contrast, is considerable: two years of skirmishes, of labor disputes, of employee discontent at not obtaining the increases they believe they are entitled to. If one wanted to fan the class struggle one would not go about it any differently. And all this because the public authorities leave in place an antediluvian system that gives employees the impression that their remuneration is limited to the net wage, or at most the gross wage, far below the cost of their labor to the employer — the super-gross wage, which is their true remuneration!”145
Insurance schemes, when they are financed by a large share of employer contributions, are liable to become and remain structurally in deficit. The reason is very simple. Their beneficiaries do not realize what it costs them. An indispensable management link, yet consubstantial with the very principle of mutualization, is not formed.
Through employer contributions, as through third-party payment when it is practiced in such a way that the insured is no longer the one who authorizes the settlement of the total invoice amount — an amount of which they are then, more and more often, unaware — the providers of medical and paramedical care, pharmaceutical laboratories included, are likewise encouraged not to form an economic link with their customers when these are insured individuals. Everything then happens as if it were no part of their responsibilities to do their best on the quality/price ratio of their supplies. Abuses of prescription inevitably result, as do remunerations and earnings that largely escape regulation by comparison with what obtains in other activities whose economic organization makes who pays what clearer.
“Technically, the principle of replacing employer contributions with employee contributions is very simple. Take, for example, a gross wage of €2,500, giving rise to employer contributions at a rate of 40% (i.e., €1,000) and to employee contributions at a rate of 20% (i.e., €500). The net wage comes to €2,000 and the super-gross to €3,500. The social security, supplementary-pension, and unemployment funds receive the difference, i.e., €1,500. To obtain the same result while abolishing employer contributions, it suffices to raise the gross wage to the level of the super-gross, i.e., €3,500, and to set the contribution rate (employee, of course) at 42.86%.”146
“From then on it would appear clearly, indubitably, that social contributions (now exclusively employee contributions) are the worker’s payment for the social insurance they benefit from; the gross wage (equal to the present super-gross) would appear just as clearly to be the employee’s remuneration, and thus the price of labor both for the seller and for the buyer.”147
“There is nothing like telling the truth to defuse sterile conflicts, which puts the players in the economic game face to face with their responsibilities. Workers want more social protection? Very well — it is as if they wanted more comfortable housing, or more sophisticated cars, or piano lessons: it is up to them to alter the allocation of their budget according to their preferences; it is not the employers’ business. […] Let the legislator not keep households in a kind of tutelage, let it not stuff them with social protection by making them believe they can have their cake and eat it too […]. This lie poisons relations between employees and management; we must get out of it, and the way out is simple: the truthful pay slip.”148.
Subject to one further condition, this change tips the economy into a far more capable regime, one suited:
The further condition — but a primordial one when the year-on-year worsening of public debt has become the major cause of a high structural level of unemployment — is the application of ??.