Rennes Metropole has a lower unemployment rate than the overall rate for France (7.9% vs. 9.8%), but 39% of these people have been unemployed for more than two years. This number is rising faster than the overall unemployment rate.

Rennes Metropole has a 25 year policy to tackle long term unemployment of low skilled people through partnership with non-profit social enterprises. It includes social clauses in its public procurement requiring companies that bid on tenders to create a social inclusion programme within the services they will carry out for the city. This can include hiring people who are long term unemployed, people with disabilities, or providing training to underqualified workers.

The city administration set up a dedicated team ‘guichet unique des clauses sociales’ that works across all the city departments as a single contact point and which help add social clauses to the city’s procurement activities. As a result, the city now has a strong internal partnership between the waste, public spaces and social departments that have developed a range of socially beneficial projects in waste management and the upkeep of green spaces.

One example of a project coming from social clauses in public procurement policy is a tender in waste recycling carried out by social enterprise, La Feuille d’Erable.

The company is responsible for the collection and recycling of city waste. As part of the tender, La Feuille d’Erable also runs a ‘back to work’ programme. People who face barriers to employment are hired for six to 24 months and receive additional training, career guidance and job search assistance. For a number of years, Rennes Metropole has pursued a waste recycling policy for both households and businesses. For this policy to be successful there needs to be an increased awareness of what could be sorted and a change in people’s attitudes and habits.

Therefore La Feuille d’Erable also carries out awareness raising activities on recycling for businesses, pupils and residents. At schools, this involves practical demonstrations on how the circular economy works, for instance showing how paper is recycled or mini-lab demonstrations on composting. For businesses, the workshops include demonstrations on how to sort and manage waste without disrupting company activities and how to carry out audits to help green the company. La Feuille d’Erable holds on average of 85 events a year to promote recycling.

La Feuille d’Erable has also extended the range and volume of products it recycles. For example wooden crates that are left after the farmers’ markets are turned into fire lighters and then sold on premises or through organic shops and supermarkets. The company has also started offering new services, such as the collection of light bulbs, batteries, printer cartridges and disposable cups from offices.

The ‘back to work’ programme and career guidance to the long term unemployed provided by La Feuille d’Erable is funded by a state subsidy. Rennes Metropole outsources its recycling to La Feuille d’Erable. The city, together with the regional authorities, co-funded building renovations to provide adequate premises for skills training and career guidance. ADEME (French Agency for Environment and Energy Management) helped with the purchase of a crusher for recycling the wooden crates.

The social clauses in Rennes Metropole’s public procurement contribute to supporting local social enterprises that assist 500 to 1,000 people annually in returning to the labour market. La Feuille d’Erable employs approximately 50 people through the ‘back to work’ programme each year.

Working for Feuille d’Erable, the beneficiaries develop new transferable skills, for example truck driving with on-board computing, waste sorting or customer service skills. As a result, around 60% of the beneficiaries each year are able to return to work or enter further training. The examples of permanent jobs that people find include truck driving, preparing shipments from warehouses, or in industry production chains.

Through adding the awareness raising campaign, extending its range of products and extending its paper and cardboard collection, La Feuille d’Erable increased the number of ‘back to work’ employees from 23 equivalent full time positions in 2001 to 43 by 2013.

In Green Jobs for social inclusion (see references), EUROCITIES identifies three main factors that contribute to the success of these city initiatives to create green jobs for social inclusion at the local level.

They are:

1. Combining demand and supply side interventions:  an intervention does not solely focus on developing people’s competences, skills and motivation (supply side intervention) but also aims to create a tangible route into the labour market (demand side intervention).

On the demand side, the programme's objective is to provide a ‘protected’ working environment with the view of supporting people to gain real work experience to enable them to compete in the mainstream labour market.

These demand side interventions are then complemented by well-matched activation and training measures (supply side interventions) helping people to gain specific skills and improve their chances of accessing the labour market.

2. Linking the interventions to local employment opportunities

The second success factor is the strong link between the programmes and local employment opportunities. Cities as the level of government closest to the people have an in-depth knowledge of their local labour markets. They can design programmes in line with local economic demand and prepare people for jobs that are available locally. The effectiveness of the demand and supply interventions is made stronger when they are grounded in local businesses and job market needs.

3. Tailoring activation measures to the specific needs of people

The third success factor of the programmes is linking the activation measures to the specific needs of the target groups.

For local authorities, programmes that combine greening and social inclusion bring added value, particularly during periods of budgetary constraint and growing demand for services. Integrated programmes that address several objectives with one investment bring efficiency to local interventions. Given the longer term perspective of the sector, linking job seekers to local jobs in the green economy should continue to bring results as the sector is set to grow.

More information on the success factors: http://nws.eurocities.eu/MediaShell/media/green_jobs_for_social_inclusion_intro_FINAL.pdf

"Local strategies to implement national energy efficiency schemes", in Green Jobs for social inclusion, EUROCITIES, June 2015, 30-31.