PARIS (Reuters) - A call from France's Socialist labour minister to crack down on jobless benefit fraud infuriated trade unionists and left-wing politicians on Monday, who accused him of unfairly targeting the victims of a weak economy.
With unemployment above 10 percent and rising, the UNEDIC unemployment fund has accumulated more than 21 billion euros (16.5 billion pounds) of debt and is seen running a funding shortfall of 3.7 billion euros this year.
Labour Minister Francois Rebsamen said the Pole Emploi job centre needed to tighten controls on jobseekers, saying some of the umemployed were taking advantage of the system by not actively seeking work.
"I'm asking Pole Emploi to strengthen its controls to make sure that people are indeed looking for work," he told iTele. "At some point, there needs to be a penalty."
The comments brought an angry response from trade union leaders, left-wing Socialist and Green party politicians who said that Rebsamen was merely trying to cover up for his government's inability to lower joblessness.
In 2012, Francois Hollande levelled similar criticisms at his predecessor as France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, after he had proposed tighter benefit rules.
"Rebsamen's comments are scandalous and indecent," said Jean-Francois Kieffer, a senior CGT labour union official on Tuesday. "This left-wing government is conducting right-wing policies."
France has one of Europe's more generous unemployment benefit systems. To be eligible, jobseekers must have worked for four months of the last 28 and can receive benefits, worth around 60 percent of their salary, for a maximum of 24 months.
Job centre employees - who each handle up to 250 cases - complain of understaffing and say they lack resources to check that jobseekers are indeed seeking work, as they must do each month - often just by telephone - to receive benefits.
By contrast, in Britain jobseekers must check in at the job centre physically and receive a payment of just over 88 euros per week. However, the allowance is topped up with additional benefits for housing and childcare.
Left wing politicians criticised Rebsamen's comments as unfairly taking aim at the jobless.
"I wonder whether he (Rebsamen) knows about being jobless," Greens party official Emmanuelle Cosse said in a tweet. "The problem is unemployment, not the unemployed."
In 2013, the number of registered frauds on unemployment insurance in France was up 50 percent on the previous year, for a total of 58 million euros. Parliamentary investigators argue that the cost of fraud was at least three times as high.
A source close to President Francois Hollande added to criticism of Rebsamen's comment.
"This isn't the most important subject of the day," said the source.
(1 US dollar = 0.7623 euro)
(Reporting By Nicholas Vinocur and John Irish and Gregory Blachier; Editing by Andrew Callus)