2023-12-05 04:30:18
Young apprentices at the Airbus high school in Toulouse practice a well-being session at work, September 21, 2023. FREDERIC SCHEIBER / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP
From his workshop on the shores of Lake Annecy, with a panoramic view of the mountains, Eric Roussel, at the head of Neo, a manufacturer of technical products for outdoor sports, seeks to understand. “In 2022, we experienced a significant increase in sick leave and absences among our team of twenty-seven employees, which led to an overall drop of 10% in production: in other words, without this absenteeism, we could have increased our turnover accordingly. » Behind the testimony of this business leader, the observation of a fairly widespread phenomenon in France since the health crisis: the decline in productivity.
Across the country, between 2019 and mid-2023, added value – the wealth produced – increased by 2%, but the number of employees increased by 6.5%. Since the health crisis, companies have in fact recruited massively: according to the latest figures published, Wednesday, November 29, by INSEE, the French economy had on that date nearly 1.2 million more salaried jobs than at the end 2019.
However, when the number of workers increases faster than production, this translates mathematically into a drop in productivity. “Given the slowdown in growth recorded since 2019, if productivity had not fallen, the French economy would not have had to create 1.2 million jobs, but destroy 180,000, explains economist Eric Heyer, director of the analysis and forecasting department at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions (OFCE). It’s as if we now have around 1.3 million “too many” employees. »
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Expressed in hourly productivity (i.e. the added value created over an hour worked), the drop reached 4.6% over the period 2019-mid 2023. And if we recall that, before the pandemic, the Hourly productivity has increased year after year by around 0.9% per year since the 2010 decade, the drop is therefore even clearer. Around 7 percentage points compared to this trajectory started before the Covid-19 crisis.
Should we be worried?
Labor productivity has slowed sharply over the past four decades in most advanced economies, from annual growth of 3% to 5% in the 1970s to around 1%, says the National Productivity Council report released in October. The Covid-19 crisis, which brought economies to a standstill, naturally caused productivity to plummet. But since then, and this is its specificity, France has struggled to redress the situation. “It has the worst performance of the entire European Union [UE] »worries Eric Dor, director of studies at the Iéseg School of Management.
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