I am great fan of the @FT but this headline is very misleading. The French “partial unemployment” scheme is designed precisely to avoid making employees redundant or putting them “on benefit”

It is meaningless to compare the 4m French figure with America’s 6.6m jobless claims. In France, it is employers who apply to the government for “partial unemployment” to cover their works, not the employees

Employees continue to receive their pay, and payslips, from employers during the period of “partial unemployment”. They are not laid off. It is employers who do the paperwork with government to secure state support for those payments