Any company with at least 50 employees that initiates redundancy proceedings is required to draw up a Plan de Sauvegarde de l’Emploi (PSE).

Since 2013, the law on securing employment contained in the ANI has modified the order of negotiations and the role of bodies. From now on, social measures must be addressed before the economic project. These are negotiated with union delegates (if the company is not in the unilateral process), and the economic project is submitted for consultation to the Central Works Council (CCE) and/or the Works Council (CE).

There are two options for drawing up a PSE:

• Negotiate a collective agreement with the trade unions represented in the company;
• Drawing up a unilateral document without prior negotiation or after negotiations have failed.

In both cases, you must inform the Works Council (CE) and request its consultation. On this occasion, the draft collective agreement on social measures is presented, together with the business plan underlying the decision to cut jobs. If the Works Council cannot question the measures set out in the draft majority collective agreement, its consultation is compulsory. You must detail the number of job cuts planned, the job categories concerned, the redundancy criteria defining the link between the jobs eliminated and the employees ultimately targeted for redundancy, the projected timetable for redundancies and the accompanying social measures.

It should be remembered that a collective redundancy scheme has no professional or personal link with the people who would be made redundant following an internal redeployment proposal. This is a restructuring decision that determines a target organization in line with a coherent economic project.

The PSE involves informing the Direction Régionale des Entreprises, de la Concurrence, de la Consommation, du Travail et de l’Emploi (Direccte) of the opening of negotiations with union delegates and the works council. In this case, the collective agreement is submitted for validation, so that it can be implemented within the company. If you draw up a unilateral document, you must submit it to the Direccte, which will be responsible for approving it. Approval is a possible option, but it may require more information to be transmitted to the Direccte, given the absence of social dialogue. You should also be aware that the Direccte’s decision can be appealed before the administrative court.

In general, social measures aim to limit the number of redundancies. The PSE you draw up must systematically include a section on redeployment for employees made redundant, even if the Macron law has relaxed the procedure for internal redeployment of employees abroad. The issue of internal redeployment remains a central obligation for all redundancy plans. The procedure for monitoring the implementation of the outplacement plan must be specified in the PES, by means of a monitoring committee. Terms and conditions are defined for both internal participants (management, union representatives, works council members, etc.) and external participants (Direccte representatives, Pôle Emploi, service provider in charge of running the scheme, etc.), as well as for decision-making.

The PSE must contain the following elements:

• Actions planned for internal and external redeployment of employees ;
• Creation of new activities by the company ;
• Support for the creation of new activities or takeover of existing activities by employees;
• Training for adaptation or retraining, validation of acquired experience (VAE), use of the CPF ;
• Measures to reduce or reorganize working hours (including overtime), conditions for implementing redeployment leave or the Contrat de Securisation Professionnelle (CSP) ;
• Specific outplacement plan for employees over 50 or whose professional reintegration proves complicated for social or qualification reasons.