Transition rates from temporary to permanent contracts², 2015 Share of temporary contracts by educational attainment, 2015 Incidence of temporary employment among youths, 2015 Probability of accessing employer-sponsored training from a temporary contract³

ASSESSMENT AND RECOMMENDATIONS OECD ECONOMIC SURVEYS: FRANCE © OECD 2017 43 flexible would also facilitate better job matches see Figure 24 above and the mobility of high-ability workers towards innovative firms Adalet McGowan and Andrews, 2015. Several recent reforms have aimed at improving legal procedures following dismissals, reducing their length and associated costs Table 8. Courts may well be sticking to the recently introduced indicative scale for indemnities, but the new government still wants to make them binding to increase legal certainty. In the OECD only France and Mexico rely exclusively on lay assessors for the initial stage of labour litigation. Deploying professional judges to guide lay assessors would improve the quality of judgements. The effectiveness of conciliation attempts preceding litigation could be boosted by sanctioning parties who do not appear in person, possibly through automatic loss of the case, as in the United Kingdom. This would shorten procedures, which has been shown to improve employees’ perception of job security Fraisse et al., 2013. Combining an improvement in the quality of labour court procedures with training reform would be particularly effective in increasing the use of permanent contracts and productivity and should make the reform package more attractive to employees Fialho, 2017. Figure 30. Fixed-term contracts are widespread across all qualification levels and seldom lead to stable jobs 1. Including post-secondary non-tertiary education. 2. Employees on temporary contract in year t-1 but declaring having been hired on a permanent contract in year t. 3. Estimated percentage difference in 2012 between workers on temporary and permanent contracts in the probability of accessing training paid for or organised by the employer in the year preceding the survey, obtained by controlling for workers’ literacy and numeracy skills, and for their individual characteristics. The data are based solely on Flanders for Belgium and on England and Northern Ireland for the United Kingdom. Source: Eurostat 2017, Detailed annual European Labour Force Survey results and EU-SILC Database; OECD 2017, OECD Labour Force Statistics Database; OECD 2013, OECD Skills Outlook 2013, OECD Publishing, Paris. 1 2 http:dx.doi.org10.1787888933577477 10 20 30 40 50 60 ESP FRA GRC ITA POL EU28 FIN PRT SVK DEU LUX HUN BGR SWE BEL NLD SVN CZE IRL LTU NOR EST AUT DNK ISL ROU LVA GBR

B. Transition rates from temporary to permanent contracts², 2015

Per cent, 16-64 5 10 15 20 25 Less than Upper secondary¹ Tertiary All levels upper secondary France OECD

A. Share of temporary contracts by educational attainment, 2015

Per cent, 15-64 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 AUS LVA EST JPN GBR DNK TUR HUN NOR OECD KOR SVK CZE CAN IRL ISL GRC AUT BEL FIN CHL LUX CHE NLD DEU SWE ITA FRA PRT ESP POL SVN

C. Incidence of temporary employment among youths, 2015

Per cent of dependent employment, 15-24 -30 -25 -20 -15 -10 -5 5 10 EST SVK FRA NOR ESP DNK CAN JPN BEL NLD FIN POL SWE AUT IRL GBR KOR DEU AUS USA

D. Probability of accessing employer-sponsored training from a temporary contract³, 2012

Estimated probability ASSESSMENT AND RECOMMENDATIONS OECD ECONOMIC SURVEYS: FRANCE © OECD 2017 44 Giving more space to collective negotiations French labour law is often not well adapted to the diverse nature of the concrete situations of firms and their employees. Giving a greater role to sectoral and firm-level negotiations instead to determine wages and working conditions would help to increase flexibility to adapt wages to productivity growth in sectors and firms, supporting employment. Good labour relations are also conducive to negotiating organisational changes that help to improve efficiency and adopt new technologies, promoting productivity. They also play an important role for inclusiveness and job quality. France has an unusually large number of bargaining sectors: around 700 compared to roughly 150 in Germany. A number of them are small and do not comprise enough firms to ensure effective negotiations. Moving ahead rapidly with the envisaged merger of such sectors would be useful to improve the quality of negotiations. The government regularly extends sectoral wage agreements to firms that not were involved in negotiations, which can hinder employment. Even though the Ministry can Figure 31. Employment Protection Legislation appears to be restrictive overall Index scale of 0 to 6, from least to most restrictive, 2013 1 1. Or most recent available year. Source: OECD 2017, Employment Protection Legislation Indicators Database. 1 2 http:dx.doi.org10.1787888933577496 1 2 3 4 5 USA CAN GBR JPN NZL IRL HUN CHE AUS ISL EST SVK BEL MEX ISR OECD ESP GRC SVN FIN DNK POL LUX TUR NOR AUT KOR FRA SWE CHL DEU ITA LVA NLD CZE PRT

A. Regular contracts individual dismissals