AT within days, the pension reform law could have been adopted on 1is April… Too bad, because the farce inscribed at the heart of its first article would have deserved to be in tune with the calendar: “In accordance with the presidential commitment, specifies the explanatory memorandum, this article provides for the abolition of the main special pension schemes . But, quickly, it is specified that this “removal” must, in reality, only concern the schemes of the electricity and gas industries (IEG) and the RATP and a few micro-schemes, such as that of the Banque de France or the Economic Council , social and environmental (Cese). Not a word, nothing, on the schemes for civil servants, which are nevertheless by far the main special schemes, by the importance of their size but, also, by the model they offer to most of the other special schemes in the sector public which are only a reduced scale reproduction. In the end, the schemes supposed to be abolished only have 7% of the members of all the special schemes in their ranks. For those who hoped that the reform would be based on equity, as had been solemnly announced, it will therefore be necessary to go back…
grandfather clause
Especially since the joke does not stop there, on the contrary. By “removal” of special schemes, we must understand “closure”… This semantic subtlety means that the reform will not apply to current members of these schemes, who will benefit from the famous “grandfather clause”, but only to future entrants. The reform will therefore only bear its first fruits at best after about forty years, which will bring us to the mid-2060s. of her surviving spouse), which sends us, this time, to the dawn of the next century! Without laughing, the government which claimed to build the “social protection system of the XXIe century” seems rather to have tackled that of the 22nde century.
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It is always surprising to note to what extent, in France, pension reforms are two-speed. In common law schemes, the measures apply immediately whereas, in special schemes in the public sector, they apply only partially, or only to subsequent generations, not without having previously made the subject to substantial compensation. It is neither more nor less than what the unions are trying to negotiate at the moment, very little representative of all French employees and, above all, obsessed with the sole interests of public officials.
Gasworks in terms of financing
Still, the very gradual closure of special schemes poses a thorny problem: how to continue to finance pensions and other house benefits for nearly eighty years, knowing that these schemes are often already under infusion from the taxpayer? The drafters of the pension reform law are well aware of this challenge since they did not fail to alert the legislator by specifying that the closure of the special schemes in question “will require […] to review the financial circuit for financing these schemes” and that “work will be carried out in this direction in 2023 with a view to the Social Security financing bill for 2024”. However, this work has already begun and, in the absence of imagination, the trick consists, no more and no less, in “siphoning off” the common law schemes of private sector employees, the Cnav and the Agirc-Arrco, which, more than ever, will then act as a cash cow within the French pension system. As a reminder, each year, nearly 4 billion euros are already diverted from CNAV funds to feed other pension schemes, in a Kafkaesque game of piping whose complexity and lack of legitimacy have been pointed out several times by the Court of Auditors. But the idea is to add new improbable transfers within what already looks like a real gas factory. Thus, throughout the XXIe century, is it expected that the common law schemes, whose affiliates have made the greatest efforts in the context of successive reforms, finance schemes which provide, on the contrary, extraordinary benefits, for a generation of agents which will have been globally very spared. Obviously, no principle can justify such reverse “solidarity” which has no equivalent in the pension systems of our European neighbours.
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To set up such assemblies, the administration is based on the precedent of the SNCF which passed, neither seen nor known, without derailing. The closure of the SNCF special scheme was indeed orchestrated as part of the 2018 railway reform. However, the common law schemes for employees were invited to finance this closure. For the first financial year (2020), the amount of the transfer is small since it amounted to 10 million euros, but it has already quintupled since it should reach 57 million euros this year and never stop growing. increase over the next few decades. In all, several billion are called to transit. Thus, the schemes for simple employees, with their processions of smicards, already finance the retirement of the SNCF today and, tomorrow, it will also be that of the personnel of the RATP, the gas and electricity industries and the Bank of France. Plans in which careers have generally been much shorter and where the pensions paid are twice as good. All this, in the country of equality, in the greatest silence of the unions, which, however, have no trouble getting noticed when it comes to retirement… And, unfortunately, it’s not April Fools !
*Pierre-Édouard du Cray, from the association Retirement Savings, is a consultant in public finance and taxation