01.11.2016

Myriam El Khomri signed an agreement allowing for 232 additional training programs

The Minister of Labor was in Saint-Martin this afternoon as part of an official visit to the West Indies.

After having visited Pôle Emploi, attended a job dating session and spoken with the elected representatives of Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy in the hall of the Collectivité in Marigot, the Minister of Labor, Employment and Vocational Training signed an agreement so that the "500,000 Training Programs" plan, which was launched in January by the Government, will be implemented locally.

"The State is going to provide 700,000€ so that 232 additional training programs are implemented", announced Myriam El Khomri. "They will supplement the 105 training programs introduced by the Collectivité. In all, there will therefore be 337 additional places that will be created," she added. "253 job seekers have already received training", pointed out the minister for whom this trip to Saint-Martin was "important".

"There are sectors which are experiencing shortages, especially in the fields of health, the hotel and catering business and construction. Company managers in the paramedical sector for instance told us about the difficulties they had to recruit and the lack of qualification of candidates", said the minister.

"The unemployment situation here is not equal to the challenges. Half of the people in Saint-Martin don’t have access to qualification," she observed. “The situation is urgent. It’s a social, moral and economic requirement", explained Myriam El Khomri who also admitted the need to recruit two additional corporate advisers at the Pôle Emploi agency. This should be possible in the 4,000 additional advisers plan promised by the President of the Republic. These two recruitments should allow to better recruit and "fight against the hidden market".

In the middle of the afternoon, the Minister is supposed meet with the socio-occupational interest groups whose main concern is the cost of labor. When questioned on this subject by the journalists at a press conference, Myriam El Khomri explained that the Collectivité of Saint-Martin had to use an article of the general code of the territorial collectivités in order to ask for "adjustments". However, she didn’t specify which ones. For the record, it is indeed possible in the framework of the organic law to ask Paris to adapt a measure. That’s what the Collectivité did with the earned income supplement (RSA).

President Aline Hanson took advantage of the minister’s arrival to give her the application file in order classify Saint-Martin as an international tourist zone (ZTI) in order to allow stores to open on Sunday afternoon.

After having signed the agreement, the minister went to visit the company, Dauphin Telecom. She then went to Concordia in order to lay the first stone of the local mission.

Estelle Gasnet