The centrist former Socialist economy minister has signalled his intention to move quickly to free up businesses by cutting red tape in an attempt to generate much-needed jobs and growth.
Giving himself a September deadline, Macron says he will use executive orders to sidestep parliament.
Efforts at labour reforms under former Socialist president Francois Hollande led to massive street protests last year, many of which turned violent, resulting in the watering down of several measures.
The reforms caused a deep rift within the Socialist Party, leaving the government to bypass parliament to ram through the law.
Meetings between Macron, 39, and the leaders of the three main unions, CFDT, CGT and Force Ouvriere, were to be followed by a meeting today with Pierre Gattaz, head of the main employers’ federation Medef.
While employers’ representatives have hailed the plans, unions are wary.
“Job market reform is the major subject in France today,” Gattaz said. “Let’s do it in all transparency, with consultation, but quickly.”
But Laurent Berger, head of the most reform-minded union, the CFDT, warned that a “hasty reform of the labour code would be counter-productive (and) if Emmanuel Macron wants to ram it through, it won’t work”.
His counterpart at the more hardline CGT, Philippe Martinez, also took issue with haste while noting that the timeline coincides with summer holidays for millions of French workers.
“It’s a bit much to debate such an essential law while workers are on holiday,” Martinez said.
Unions fear new inroads into hard-won workers’ rights, though Macron has yet to spell out the new measures.
On the campaign trail, Macron pledged to overhaul complex labour regulations and reduce the weight of the French state in the economy in order to free up business activity.
Bosses would be allowed to negotiate working conditions directly with their employees rather than being required to honour industry-wide agreements.
Radical leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, an also-ran in the presidential election, said the change would result in “social dumping between companies”, predicting that “a certain number of companies will die because that is the law of capital”.
Deregulation will “target workers but also businesses and entrepreneurs”, Melenchon warned during a visit to the northern city of Lille.
Macron, who was elected on May 7, also wants to impose a ceiling on severance pay to workers, a measure virulently opposed by unions.
Yestersday, the president’s office said Macron would not divulge the “precise content of the reform” because Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and Labour Minister Muriel Penicaud will continue the meetings today.
“His social agenda and his convictions were largely voiced during the campaign.
The French and the unions know what it’s about,” the president’s office said in a statement.
Philippe said the meetings would conclude on Monday.
Government spokesman Christophe Castaner warned on French television: “All obstruction must be prevented.
You don’t have the right to impede France when you don’t agree with such and such a measure, especially when it was at the heart of Emmanuel Macron’s presidential agenda.”
Macron was Hollande’s economy minister for two years before quitting the government last summer to launch his presidential bid as an independent centrist.
Philippe is from the rightwing Republicans party, while Labour Minister Penicaud is the former head of Business France, the agency in charge of promoting France abroad.
French unions urged President Emmanuel Macron yesterday not to try to hustle through his labour reform plans this summer, in contrast with calls from the main employers’ group for swift measures to reinforce rising business optimism.
Macron’s meetings with unions and employers were a first crucial test of his commitment to carry out labour reforms which he sees as vital to reviving an economy bedevilled by high unemployment, but which are opposed on the Left.
The head of France’s biggest moderate trade union said he had urged the newly-elected Macron to leave more time for discussion and not to try to rush his reforms through by executive decree this summer — a strategy which Macron has suggested he might follow.
“I asked him not to do it hurriedly, to do it without rushing, that the idea should not be to wrap everything up by the end of summer, end of August,” CFDT leader Laurent Berger told reporters.
The centrist leader wants to make hiring and firing easier by giving more powers to companies to reach in-house deals on working time, for instance, and capping severance packages awarded by industrial tribunals.
Against a background of 9.6% unemployment, the pro-business, Europe-minded Macron has made a loosening of labour market regulations his biggest economic priority for his first year in office.
During the roller-coaster campaign, Macron said he would seek parliament’s approval over the summer for powers to push through legislation by means of executive decree.
But speaking after his own meeting with Macron later on, the head of the more militant CGT union said the president seemed willing to take more time than initially planned.
“The timetable seems to have changed,” Philippe Martinez told reporters.
“It seems to me that the short time frame that was planned is not as short as I had understood,” the leader of the CGT, which led weeks of sometimes violent protests last year against reforms by former Socialist President Francois Hollande, added.
A source close to Macron told Reuters it would be up to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, a former right-wing mayor, and Labour Minister Muriel Penicaud to decide on the timetable.
“The president is very keen to respect the allocation of tasks between a president who sets the course while the prime minister and the labour minister establish a working timetable and discuss measures in detail,” the source said.
But Macron was also reminded of French businesses’ pressing demands for a more flexible labour market.
“The labour market reform must be tackled quickly.
It’s essential to be quick on this major French problem,” Pierre Gattaz, the head of the Medef group of employers, said, adding that speed was essential to give confidence to investors.
The head of the smaller CPME group of employers said Macron was aiming to hold talks with unions until about mid-June, with a parliament vote to give him powers to legislate via decrees over the summer and a final parliament vote in September.
French companies have shown signs of growing optimism since Macron’s election on May 7.
In a widely watched survey published yesterday, the French private sector was shown to have grown at the fastest pace in six years in May, with companies mentioning Macron’s election as a reason for optimism.
That chimed with a separate survey from the official Insee statistics office which showed morale in the industrial sector at its highest level since June 2011.
