Entre droit et injonction à la mobilité : discussion d'une 'motilité' "raisonnable" comme ressource pour l'insertion professionnelle

In many countries, payment of unemployment benefit is conditional on active job-seeking on the part of recipients, who are required to accept any "reasonable" job offers made to them (Dalloz 2008). In France, this notion of "Reasonable Job Offer" (ORE) has been redefined (Fretel et al. 2018), sparking strong public debate, particularly polarized around the issues of commuter mobility. The uniform criteria that had appeared in the law since 2008 (workplace less than 30 km or less than one hour from home by public transport) were abolished in 2018 in favor of a case-by-case definition, resulting from negotiation between the job seeker and his or her advisor during the 1st interview, in order to take account of unequal individual situations in terms of mobility. However, the abolition of statutory thresholds is seen by some as undermining protection and equality of treatment between the unemployed, in the absence of a common basis for determining these criteria during negotiation.

Here, we propose alternatives to this "reasonable" criterion of commuting mobility, based on the individual's motility (his ability to move, according to Kaufmann 2002) and his range of mobility possibilities (the quality of existing transport offers). We use a new isoline calculator (job offers accessible in an individual commuting catchment area delimited by a threshold of time, distance or travel cost) to test different reasonable criteria on our original data collected face-to-face from 7,000 jobseekers by mobility advisors for professional integration (partners in the study). To articulate the notion of motility with the individual responsibility of the unemployed, we mobilize the capability approach proposed by Amartya Sen (2009).

Our results show that a generalized cost criterion reflecting the effort (cost, painfulness, externality) associated with the commute is more relevant to the ORE than its duration or distance. Since 2018, we have found a significant reduction in the acceptable commuting time for these jobseekers. We develop three types of individual mobility indexes, which suggest in this context that the main mobility gains for employment come from specific mobility support, more than from ORE-related mobility control and injunction.