The Interprofessional guaranteed minimum wage or salaire minimum interprofessionnel garanti ('SMIG') was the first statutory minimum wage in France, adopted in 1950. A number of former French colonies also have or have previously had a law with that name or a similar name. This article concerns the SMIG laws of France and Morocco.

In France (1950-1970)

French sovereignty after the occupations of World War II was restored in 1945 and the French Fourth Republic began on 13 October 1946. The years leading to 1950 were politically contentious but focused on economic reconstruction from the devastation of the war. The centrist coalition governments of the Third Force, positioned between the Communist left and the Gaullist right, adopted the country's first minimum wage law in 1950. However, the groundwork had actually been laid during the wartime Vichy government.

According to the Paris-based Higher Institute of Labour (Institut supérieur du travail), in its history of minimum wage laws in France:^[1]

It was the Charter of Work issued on October 4, 1941 that paved the way. It referred to a 'living minimum wage' and this notion necessarily had a universal character: a subsistence minimum is the same for everyone, whatever the profession. Still, the cost of life is not the same everywhere which was then much more sensitive than today. Therefore, they had divided the country into twenty "pay zones", each with a different minimum wage, but all minimum wages proceeded downward from that of Zone 0 (Paris) by a fixed percentage: -2.5% zone, -4% zone, etc., which allowed them to maintain unity while respecting [economic] diversity. This system of zones would not disappear until May 1968: By then there were only two zones.

Paul Bacon (of the Christian Democratic MRP), who was the Minister of Labor from 1950 to 1956 and again in 1957–1959, is considered to be the father of the postwar Interprofessional Guaranteed Minimum Wage (SMIG) law passed in February 1950 under the second government of Georges Bidault, a Third Force Coalition government.

The value of the minimum wage was set by the High Commission for Collective Agreements, established by a decree on 3 March 1950. They were in charge of assessing the composition of the average household budget, which served to determine the value of the SMIG (i.e. minimum rate).

In August 1950, the first report of the commission was presented to the Council of Ministers (the cabinet), which issued a decree that established the first SMIG rate at 64 francs (or 78 in Île-de-France, the Paris region). The decree did not apply at the time to certain parts of France: those overseas departments in French Algeria, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion. They would have their SMIG rate set later, depending on local conditions. The minimum rate in France also did not apply to agricultural occupations, which received a separate minimum wage law, called the SMAG, later in 1950 (see below).

Defending the minimum wage as it was implemented under his first government, Prime Minister René Pleven (who also led a Third Force coalition) presented it as a means of fighting the expansion of Communism.^[2] This was one of the unifying concerns of the Third Force governments of the period. (The French minimum wage law was introduced the year after the Berlin Blockade by the Soviet Union and at the midpoint of the First Indochina War, which France's military was waging against the communist Viet Minh independence movement.)

The SMIG law was replaced in 1970 by the Salaire minimum interprofessionnel de croissance (SMIC) and by the "minimum guarantee." The latter is the basis for calculating the allocation of certain social benefits beyond wages. The reason for this change was that the SMIG minimum wage, which was only indexed to prices, increased less rapidly than average wages due to the increase in productivity (which means fewer working hours are needed to produce the same quantity of goods), which President Georges Pompidou considered abnormal. The current minimum wage of France, SMIC, (as of 1 January 2015) is €1,457.52 gross monthly.

Today, the French acronym "SMIC" is synonymous with the concept of "minimum wage," and it is dated (as well as incorrect) to use the term SMIG interchangeably with SMIC to mean minimum wage. The similarity between the two acronyms has sometimes been a source of confusion (and is sometimes not distinguished clearly in computerized translations). Even Socialist Party leader François Mitterrand, who would become President of France in a later election, mistakenly used the term SMIG in a 1974 presidential debate with Giscard d'Estaing, who quipped in response that this error proved his opponent was a "man of the past." At the time, the SMIC had only been the law for a few years. Mitterrand had actually been a Cabinet Minister in the Pleven government in 1950, the year of SMIG's introduction.

In Morocco

Morocco was a protectorate of France from 1912 until 1956, just a few years after the French government had introduced the SMIG minimum wage in France. French remains a recognized national language of Morocco and French legal influences like the SMIG continue up to the present.

References