Only three European MPs voted against the right to repair. Everyone loves repair on paper, even if only few of us actually do it. Often highlighted are the reduction of waste, savings in financial and natural resources, or the reduction of greenhouse gases caused by repair, including in the directive. Nevertheless, those who read my articles regularly know that for me, repair is first and foremost about repairers, because repair offers jobs which are local and in all territories, stable and value-added, and located at the junction of service and industry.
If the parliament’s vote is based on studies that measure the aforementioned effects, no study measures the impact of the right to repair on European employment. This is what I will examine here. However, be aware that this article presents estimates and not the results of an in-depth study. Perhaps I should ask Europe to fund it for us?
I will limit myself to large household appliances, the market I know best. We can easily imagine the creation of additional repair jobs. It is more difficult to consider the disappearance of jobs in production factories. I will therefore first compare the quantity of appliances produced by an employee of a factory to the quantity of appliances repaired by an employee of a repair company.
Few figures are available, but taking data from manufacturing plants in Poland we see that the production of large household appliances is around 2,000 units per year per employee, including management. In our experience, a large household appliance repair technician repairs about 5 to 6 units per day, or about 1,000 to 1,200 units per year. For each repairer, there are approximately 0.3 to 0.5 additional employees (call centers, logistics, management, etc.). Therefore, an employee of a repair company, including management, repairs around 700 units per year. A quick calculation shows that repair generates 2.8 times more jobs than manufacturing.
In conclusion, even if these figures only give an order of magnitude, they confirm that repair is necessarily less efficient than manufacturing, because you must travel and have parts delivered, and there is no efficiency gain linked to the repetition of actions dear to Mr. Taylor.
Second, I will estimate the volumes of appliances consumed or repaired in Europe. There are no reliable public European figures on consumption, and even fewer figures are available for the production of appliances. Eurostat figures only concern imports-exports and do not take into account intra-EU transfers. We will therefore extrapolate from France, which has had developed statistics for many years. We consider that France represents 1/7 of European households. By extrapolating the sales figures in France, we arrive at a market of around 100 million units.
Whether we base ourselves on the average lifespan of appliances of about 12 years or consider 6 to 7 large household appliances per European household, we obtain the same orders of magnitude; between 1 and 1.5 billion large household appliances installed. Our experience in France shows that about 3% of appliances break down each year, but less than half are repaired by professionals. This represents between 15 and 25 million repairs per year. If we could double the repair rate in Europe, we would therefore create 28,000 repair jobs and eliminate 10,000 jobs among manufacturers. Moreover, the manufacturing of appliances is currently massively carried out in Turkey and Asia, which would reduce the negative impact on employment in Europe.
In conclusion, the right to repair could create around 20,000 net jobs in Europe and potentially many more if the production of appliances were brought back to Europe. Indeed, a more durable and repairable appliance objectively has a longer lifespan and, as such, could be sold at a higher price. These price levels could support more local manufacturing and thus help sustain our social models. The barrier to acquisition for the least privileged among us remains. I have already written that the notion of a bonus/penalty on appliances amounts to a tax on low incomes, but this should not prevent us from imagining other solutions. The transformation of our consumption of durable goods will only happen through innovative policies. The question is not simple, but the answer is worth it.
Emmanuel Benoit, CEO of Agoragroup.