This bill extends a campaign that has been driven for several years by former employees of automotive subcontractor GM&S, in Creuse, which was liquidated after its main principal contractors withdrew. Similar versions had already been tabled in 2020 and 2024 without success, but the July 2026 text marks a fresh attempt, this time referred to the law commission.
The central principle of the text is to legally recognise situations of strong economic dependency of a subcontractor on a principal contractor, a concept that does not clearly exist in law today. It also provides for new information mechanisms, with an obligation for the principal contractor to immediately inform the subcontractor and its staff representatives of the consequences of its strategic decisions on the use of subcontracting, as part of the works council (CSE) consultation.
The most significant point concerns collective redundancy for economic reasons. If a subcontractor were to launch a job protection plan following a change of direction by a principal contractor, the resources that could be drawn upon would be assessed in relation to the combined resources of the principal contractor and the subcontractor, whereas today the economic grounds and the redeployment obligation are assessed solely at the level of the subcontracting company and its own group.
The text originated from an industrial case, but its logic could apply to arrangements widespread in the hotel sector. Outsourced cleaning companies, often heavily dependent on one or two hotel groups, security providers under commercial contract, dedicated industrial laundry firms, and technical maintenance companies bound by framework contracts, correspond precisely to the situations of economic dependency the text seeks to regulate.
The dispute that pitted, several years ago, a hotel cleaning subcontractor at Disneyland Paris against management illustrates this dynamic concretely. Trade unions had denounced cleaning workloads deemed untenable, while pointing to the principal contractor’s responsibility in a situation they said was directly linked to the very principle of outsourcing and putting providers in competition with one another.
For a hotel group, the adoption of such a text would potentially involve enhanced disclosure before any change of cleaning, security or maintenance provider, as well as increased exposure in the event of social consequences at that provider, with the hotel group’s resources then potentially taken into account when assessing any job protection plan on the subcontractor’s side.
The text, however, is still only at the stage of tabling and referral to committee. No examination timetable is guaranteed at this stage, and previous versions of this text never reached a vote. The passage from a statement of reasons to a promulgated law would likely involve substantial adjustments to its scope of application.
