The French president, Emmanuel Macron, launches the most arduous reform since he arrived at the Elysée, with which he intends to delay the minimum retirement age to guarantee the balance of the pension system, and he does so against all the unions, against the majority of public opinion and of almost all the opposition.
Its prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, will announce on Tuesday the details of what already in her first term (2017-2022) she described as “the mother of all reforms”, but which she had to leave in the ditch when the crisis broke out. of the coronavirus in 2020, and which has suffered successive postponements, the last one barely a month ago.
Borne’s latest consultations with unions and employers on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, which were intended to convey the image of a government open to discussions until the last moment, have only served to show that the train crash is inevitable and that the street pulse is going to start this month.
Laurent Berger, the leader of the French Confederation of Workers (CFDT), a union known for its negotiating spirit and for having committed to some of the great social reforms of recent years, made clear the lack of total understanding with the prime minister and her willingness to block Macron’s plans with joint actions with all the other plants.
“It is a reform that will make the system more unfair”, which will harm the “most modest” workers above all and “the toughest” in the last 30 years, said Berger, who recalled that the CFDT from the beginning has warned that it should not accept the delay in the minimum retirement age.
DELAYING THE MINIMUM RETIREMENT AGE TO 64 OR 65 YEARS
Going from the current 62 years to the 64 or 65 that the Executive is considering is the main point of the reform and by far the most controversial. Macron himself, when he was preparing his campaign for the Élysée in 2016, was thinking about other changes and recognized that raising that minimum age would not be fair because it would harm those who had started working very young.
Hervé Boulhol, responsible for the report on public pensions of the OECD, explains to EFE that those 62 years for the minimum retirement age are “a little below the average” of the organization, which is 62.4 years (63 in Spain, for example).
But Boulhol points out that half of the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have programmed reforms that together will raise that average to 63.7 years (it will rise to 65 years in Spain, to 67 in Sweden or 68 in Italy), so in the absence of changes in France, this difference would become more significant.
Another problem that France has for financial sustainability is that from the age of 60 the percentage of those who continue working is one of the lowest in the club, and this is illustrated by the fact that the average age for effective exit from the labor market is 60.4 years for men and 60.9 for women in 2020.
That is much less than the OECD average of 63.8 years for men and 62.4 for women, and also much less than the European Union average of 62.6 years for men and 61.9 for the women.
WITHOUT REFORM, PENSIONS IN THE RED NUMBERS
The Pension Orientation Council (COR), an independent public body that prepares technical analyzes to feed an informed debate in France that are the basis of discussion between the government and the social partners, predicts that the one-off surplus of the system in the last two years will be permanently invested.
The COR anticipates, specifically, a pension deficit that in the next ten years will mean between five and eight tenths of the annual gross domestic product (GDP) and that the red numbers will continue in the period of their projections until 2050.
The Finance Minister, Gabriel Attal, calculates that, without reform, the public debt will increase by half a trillion euros in 25 years. And he rejects what some unions and left-wing parties are proposing, increasing employer contributions, because he estimates that this would make companies less competitive and sentence tens of thousands of jobs, in addition to dragging down wages.
The OECD, in its December 2021 report, calculated that the relative weight of public pensions in France, which with 14.8% of GDP was already the third highest among member countries in 2018-2020, only behind Greece and Italy (in Spain it was 12.3%9, it will increase at least until 2040, when it would come to represent 15.2% of GDP.
Source: EFE
