French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on Monday he was bringing forward a planned hike in the minimum wage to December from January, as he sought to defuse a cost-of-living crisis that has sparked some of France’s worst civil unrest in years.
The government has faced a series of protests in recent weeks which started over underfunded schools but have morphed into broader protests, including riots in major cities on October 17 that caught security forces off guard.
France’s national minimum wage would normally be raised on January 1 to reflect inflation, but instead the government will raise it by 1.6 per cent in December, Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Farandou told a press conference.