Voices of the Economy by Stéphane Pedrazzi, with Laurent Guillot, CEO of Emeis

Hello.

So, today our company has no difficulty at all in attracting people. We worked with our HR director, we worked hard over the last four years to create working conditions that are better than the sector average. There is a real issue around occupational health and safety. The care sector is the most accident-prone sector in the economy, twice as high as construction. And so, construction has progressed by a factor of 2 in 20 years, they have done the work. We are not yet at the desired level because the desired level is zero, but there is work that has been done in construction. The work must now be done in the care sector.

They correspond to back pain from lifting elderly people. That is really a real issue. They correspond to falls on the same level in the facilities because water was spilled, because there was dirt. They correspond to shocks, and it is a very important factor. It is really fundamental. I come from industry, it's 100 times more than in the factories I managed 5 years ago at Saint-Gobain.

But I think first we need to train, train, train. We have plenty of talent in our companies, we have plenty of talent in France. We need to train, provide continuous training. That's what we are doing. We opened a training center last year, we want to train more. We need to debureaucratize so we can do it. We need to debureaucratize progression, the VAE, the validation of acquired experience. Today, you almost need a baccalaureate level in French to become a caregiver through the VAE. That's not possible. Our people have experience, we must give them the possibility of social progress. We need to digitalize to gain productivity. To be able to relieve our employees of administrative tasks. And that obviously will allow us with the current workforce to do more. And then, after that, I think indeed, as you said, we need to have recourse to a form of immigration, chosen immigration. We do it, we organize it for the state, for example in Austria where we select people who have been trained. We train them in Austria in German, we train them in the Austrian political system, we train them in Austrian culture, and then we accompany them in our establishments, and we should be able to do the same thing in France.

Ah, I don't know if it's controversial. What I observe is that the generation that is now reaching the dependency period, the baby boomers, they have on average assets of 300,000 euros, which is a very significant asset when you look at it. That's more than enough to finance their dependency period. It's much more than they would need. So why not mobilize this resource rather than still making this period of their life weigh on their grandchildren through a national solidarity system.