In Q3 2021, payroll employment increased again (+108,000 between the end of June and the end of September, after +158,000 then +310,000 in Q1 and Q2). These successive increases more than made up for the 315,000 job destructions in 2020, with the result that payroll employment at the end of September was well above its level at the end of 2019 (+261,000 jobs, or +1.0%). It exceeded this level in all the major sectors of activity (building construction, market and non-market tertiary) apart from industry.

In Q4 2021, payroll employment is likely to slow (+45,000 between the end of September and the end of December) then increase in a similar fashion in Q1 and Q2 2022 (+35,000 and +45,000). This slowdown compared to recent quarters primarily refl ects the slowdown in activity. As has been the case since the start of the health crisis, fluctuations in employment look set to be smaller than those in activity due to the cushioning effect of short-time working. The takeup rate of the short-time working scheme should continue to decline gradually (it is expected to drop from 1.0% of paid hours in the non-agricultural market sector on average in Q3 2021 to less than 0.5% by mid-2022), which should contribute in accounting terms to increasing apparent labour productivity per capita. In addition, after being virtually stagnant for two years, hourly productivity is expected to return to similar levels of growth to pre-crisis, or even higher, as happened in previous phases of recovery in activity. Considerable uncertainty remains, however, over the scenario forecast for employment coming out of the crisis, as the model of apparent labour productivity that usually underpins employment forecasts1 has lost its relevance since the start of the crisis.

By taking self-employment into account, which is expected to slip back moderately in 2021 then stabilise in 2022, total employment (payroll and self-employment) is expected to increase by 133,000 in H2 2021 (between the end of June 2021 and the end of December 2021) then by 80,000 in H1 2022. By the end of June 2022, it should exceed 387,000 jobs (including 386,000 payroll jobs), which was its pre-crisis level at the end of 2019, or +1.4%, over a period of two and a half years. By comparison, between 2015 and 2019, an average of 261,000 jobs (including 215,000 payroll jobs) were created each year.