MDespite the lengthening of life, by more than three months each year until recently, most French people do not want to work longer. When the opportunity arises, they retire as soon as possible. Various surveys analyze the motivations behind these retirements. That carried out by the National Old-Age Insurance Fund (CNAV) in 2008, confirmed by numerous surveys since directed by the Department of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES) of the Ministry of Social Affairs, emphasizes that those who want to work longer are those who combine work and “self-realization, personal fulfillment, self-esteem and self-expression, social usefulness, well-being and social ties”. They are most often executives, intellectual professions, university graduates.
On the other hand, those, many more numerous, who wish to leave as soon as possible combine work and “fatigue at work (physical and moral), constraints (schedules, pace of life), obligations, wear and tear, stress, pressure, deterioration of the atmosphere at work and personal status”. The surveys carried out since confirm that wear and tear at work constitutes a strong motivation at the start.
Numerous studies by sociologists have long shown the deterioration of work situations and the relationship to work in France. Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) represent a very large majority of occupational diseases and have been increasing for ten years (35,000 new cases per year). All of these indices underline the increasingly sustained rhythm of the organization of work, the increased organizational constraints and the stress at work.
“Race for performance”
These are the concrete consequences of the strategies adopted by most French companies. To remain competitive in a globalized economy, companies have chosen to keep only the most productive employees, and to ask them to work ever more intensely. If we look at the employment rates in France, in particular those of seniors, we see that they are lower than in many European countries: 53.3% of people aged 55-65 are employed in 2018, while the European average is 58.7% (71.4% in Germany or 77.9% in Sweden), which made the candidate Macron say that we worked less in France than elsewhere.
Admittedly, fewer people are working than in other countries, especially among seniors, but those who are working are doing so more and more. France combines a low employment rate for seniors and young people with one of the highest hourly labor productivity in Europe (117 for France for a base of 100 corresponding to the European average, Eurostat data for 2019). As mentioned in the 2008 CNAV study, “Insured persons under 60 have often insisted on the deterioration of the professional climate, denouncing the quest for productivity and the race for performance. It seems that these new managerial values have led to the loss of a serene and friendly atmosphere that some policyholders experienced at the start of their career, an atmosphere now suffering from more individualistic behavior. They have also led to personnel restrictions and thus contributed to the increase in workloads” (Aouici et al., 2008, page 23). If the numerous suicides at car manufacturers or at France Télécom have illustrated to the extreme the impasses of this strategy of hyperproductivity, in general, this explains in large part why those who work do not wish to do so. Longer. As for those who do not have access to employment, they do not understand that we are asking to work longer when they do not even have the possibility.
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