http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/business/france-labor-market-jobs-unemployment.html 2014-12-10 13:15:25 French Economy Minister to Present Bill to Jolt Labor Market The Socialist-led government is set to unveil a new set of growth initiatives after an unsuccessful package of payroll tax cuts for businesses. === PARIS — Creating jobs in France is proving harder than expected. The embattled Socialist-led government is making its second push this year to energize the labor market in the country, Europe’s second-largest economy, after a top economic official called the previous plan “a failure.” Although President François Hollande has made cutting unemployment the cornerstone of his tenure, the job market is getting worse. Unemployment climbed to 10.4 percent in the third quarter from 10.1 percent in the previous three months, despite a package of payroll tax cuts for businesses this year that was meant to encourage hiring. The economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, on Wednesday is presenting a new bundle of policies known as a “growth and activity” bill. It has sharply divided Mr. Hollande’s own Socialist Party but has drawn praise from France’s powerful business lobby, Medef, which argues that previous efforts did not go far enough. Mr. Macron is a former Rothschild investment banker whom Mr. Hollande chose to replace a Socialist firebrand, Arnaud Montebourg, in August. Four months into the job, Mr. Macron has been thrust onto the front lines of France’s effort to create jobs — and save Mr. Hollande’s. “Macron’s Law,” as the bill has been called, is a grab bag of measures aimed at stoking employment by freeing up some of France’s notoriously inflexible labor rules and regulations. The measures include relaxing rules on Sunday and evening opening hours at retail stores; removing some restrictions on new bus lines to increase competition with the national rail operator, SNCF; and opening up regulated professions including notaries and auctioneers to greater competition. The bill also calls for overhauling France’s complex system of labor relations boards and for five billion to six billion euros worth of sales from the French state’s holdings of corporate assets, which total €76 billion, or $94 billion. Parliament will not begin debating the bill until next month. But it has already caused controversy, with opponents planning to demonstrate against it on Wednesday. Mr. Hollande, owning up to his failure to meet a pledge to start cutting unemployment by 2013, The European Union, which has put France under budget surveillance along with a number of other countries for exceeding agreed limits to its deficit, forecasts France’s unemployment rate to remain above 10 percent at least until 2016. Mr. Hollande has blamed a lack of economic growth for this year’s continued rise in unemployment, which was 9.7 percent when he came into office in 2012 and has been rising since early 2008. French economic growth is forecast to be only 0.4 percent this year, and 1 percent in 2015. Mr. Macron said the government’s last big effort to revive the economy, the so-called Responsibility Pact, was a failure. The pact, announced by Mr. Hollande in January, aims to ease payroll taxes by up to €40 billion by 2017. In exchange, companies were expected to hire. Business owners, however, argue the government’s efforts do not go far enough to reduce labor costs. This month, thousands of them protested in the streets of Paris and Toulouse against taxes and regulations.