Vhere is France plunged back into the great maelstrom of pensions after the presentation of a new reform, Tuesday, January 10, by the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne. To the “mother of reforms” will be answered the “mother of battles”. It will begin Thursday, January 19 with a national day of action, at the call of the coalition unions against the postponement of the legal retirement age from 62 to 64, a key measure in yet another plan which will call others no later than after 2030.
There was a time when retirement meant social progress. It was in 1981, when the left established this pivotal age at 60. She went back to the program of the National Council of Resistance itself, which had set it at 65 years – the average life expectancy of men in 1945! It is “an old social aspiration which has not yet received a satisfactory response” et “a real right to rest that workers are entitled to claim”pleaded the ordinance of March 26, 1982, with lyrical accents reminiscent of the Popular Front.
Too bad if the reform ignored the iron law of the aging of the population and the lengthening of the retirement period. Life expectancy was then 70.7 years for a man and 78.9 years for a woman; both have won nine and six years since. There were 2.8 contributors for 1 retiree; the ratio will fall to 1.5 in 2040 and 1.2 in 2070. This does not condemn the system, which is bearable by 2070, provided that France agrees to no longer be, along with Italy, the European country more generous for its retirees.
“Unfair Parameter”
The lyrical illusion of 1981 dissipated, the ideal of liberated time shattered on demographic and financial realities. As early as 1991, Michel Rocard already defended in his White Paper an extension of the duration of contributions – without violating the taboo of 60 years. Since 1993, the reforms have been nothing but blood and tears: indexation of pensions to inflation and no longer to wages, calculation on the best twenty-five years instead of ten in the private sector, fixed retirement age at age 62, contribution period increased from 37.5 years to 43 years for full retirement… Quietly, but with painful measures, employers and unions have also kept the Agirc-Arrco supplementary schemes afloat.
The left, so critical today, has never gone back on these reforms. Without them, distribution would have imploded. Emmanuel Macron has followed in the footsteps of his predecessors, after having attempted the disruptive reform of a more flexible and ageless universal point-based scheme to cease his activity, but with a “golden rule” of financial balance . The reform will increase the activity rate of 60-64 year olds, one of the lowest in Europe; it will generate significant social and tax revenues, provided that companies play the game of keeping the “old” in business. Otherwise, the “Borne plan” will only inflate the number of seniors without jobs or pensions.
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