Get ready for riots. Macron trying to increase pension age in France

[Sir John Johns]

As mentioned by Angus in this thread, Macron initially campaigned (in 2017) on an ambitious plan to institute a universal pension system but finally decided to renounce to it. Instead, he decided to rise the retirement age for 62 to 64, meaning that you would be able to retire at 64 and receive a pension at full value providing you have contributed to the public pension system for forty-three full years. Otherwise, you could still retire but receive a pension with important discounts. It’s only at 67 (age remained unchanged by the reform) that one without the forty-three full years would perceive a pension at full value but still calculated on the years you have contributed. Note that the supplementary pension system for private employees (co-managed by employers’ organizations and unions) is already enforcing a three-year-long 10% discount for people retiring before 63 making uninteresting to retire at 62 for certain categories of employees.

A few professions are enjoying some early retirement (before 60) because of arduous working conditions (policemen, sewer workers, fishermen) as well as disabled workers suffering from an at least 50% permanent incapacity providing they are meeting various conditions. Provisions to better take into account arduous working conditions in the calculation of retirement age have been passed under Hollande but largely dismantled by Macron.

Obviously, the number of workers who would have contributed for forty-three full years at 64 is going to dwindle as the entering on the labor market is now happening later and as extended periods of unemployment are more frequent than before. Also, employment rate among French workers over 55 is remaining low compared to other countries, a situation which is especially problematic for unqualified or sick workers who generally struggle to reenter labor market after losing their jobs, past 55.

I hope I haven’t made mistakes because the system is incredibly complicate but I’m not the only one having difficulties understanding it.

Macron has promised some vague measure to ensure a better employment of seniors but this is staunchly opposed by the MEDEF, the employers’ main organization, which otherwise is totally okay with the rest of the reform. On a side note, if you are going to rant about unions being ‘parasites’ caring only about ‘protecting their sweet little privileges’ wait before to see the French grand patronat: the MEDEF, which is only representing large companies not the middle and small businesses (which have their own organization you rarely heard of), is currently headed by Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, the scion of an aristocratic family whose nobility dated back at least from Louis XV. His predecessor, Pierre Gattaz, while a simple commoner, was the son of a president of the CNPF, the forerunner of the MEDEF. Yet, still an improvement since the days of the godawful Ernest-Antoine Seillère, a complete caricature of the nineteenth century robber baron (well, he actually has a title of baron!), who wasn’t actually a very good businessman and has since been sentenced for tax fraud.

[Sir John Johns]

Anyway, this is turning into a Waterloo for Macron for a variety of reasons having mostly to do with the decision of the president to rush the passage of the reform, his own supreme arrogance and the complete PR disaster that has surrounded the sale of the reform.

The reform has been decided without any semblance of consultation with the unions, not even the CFDT certainly not a hard-left union but on the contrary considered by other unions as too moderate if not sell-outs (their former president, Nicole Notat, endorsed Juppé’s 1995 failed reform that led to massive protests and later created her own social rating agency). It is contradicting previous statements made by Macron about how it would be hypocrite to rise retirement age when the question of full-employment of seniors hasn’t been resolved.

The reform is sponsored by the labor minister, Olivier Dussopt, a former socialist deputy who had previously advocated a retirement age at 60 and left the PS overnight to join the Macron government he publicly trashed just before. Of course, Dussopt is investigated in a corruption case like God how many ministers in this government.

The Macronist deputies and senators have been charged of selling the pension reform and they are truly doing a terrible job at it, maybe because they were advised about the full details of it. So, there have been a senator claiming that roofers are now equipped with exoskeletons, a deputy who said that tilesetter isn’t an as much exhausting job than before because of ‘kneepads’ and now another one who declared that the underpaid (€800 a month) persons hired to help disabled children in school have chose that job ‘to not having to work on Wednesdays and school holidays’ in response to opposition deputies demanding a better recognition of their occupation.

The Renaissance caucus also published on its Twitter account a series of pictures supposed to explain how the reform is actually a social progress that was mocked because it is full of inaccuracies or is taking very rare/non-existing cases because probably they themselves understand nothing to the byzantine rules of retirement system and are ignorant about the details of the reform. Also, the minister delegate to relations with parliament has been forced to admit that the pension reforms will penalize women employees.

Additionally, the chairman of the body in charge of evaluating the future financial situation of the pension system (Conseil d’orientation des retraites, COR), has somewhat tempered the government’s affirmations over the worrying future of the pensions system and was rewarded by criticisms from the prime minister because the government knows better than the COR.

The reform will still been rushed in the parliament as, while the government doesn’t want to negotiate with unions and just declared it will not negotiate on the 64 retirement age, it has still surrendered to the LR’s main demand to obtain a support of the right-wing party to the reform: an immediate increase of the minimum old-age pension to an amount corresponding to 85% of the minimum wage aka €1,200 (the amount of the RSA basic income for working age people over 25 is €598, disability pension for working-age people is €956), a measure apparently benefiting mostly retired retailers and farmers (aka the LR voters, what a surprise).

The suggestion that the wealthier pensioners could made a financial effort has been totally discarded by the government in spite of present-day pensioners (who for the most part have experienced full-employment, stable careers, have contributed less to the pension system, have retired early and have been able to buy a house thanks to the economic environment of that time) enjoying a median monthly revenue of €1,900, higher than the €1,840 median monthly revenue of the working-age population.

Anyway, LR (which promised before the election to increase retirement age to 65) is divided whether voting for the reform, the centrist/regionalist LIOT parliamentary group has said it will not vote for it while there is a beginning of internal revolt inside Macronism over the harshness and injustice of the reform. This is without mentioning that the whole reform could be anyway axed by the Constitutional Council because the barely regular proceedings to get it passed in the parliament.

In a last attempt to convince LR rebels to vote the reforms, the interior minister Gérald Darmanin (a particularly nasty individual) has gave an interview in in which he warns about Mélenchon wanting to put the country in a mess, rants about the ‘laziness and bobo leftism’ and claims that the presidential majority ‘is defending work, the values of efforts, of merit and emancipation’ (yet he had Marlène Schiappa as underminister) in line with the government’s usual ‘people are unemployed because they are lazy’ discourse.

One can also note the specious argument made by Macron himself (that many people will not forget): the reform has been ‘democratically presented, validated’ in the 2021 elections. Yes, the elections where he didn't get a parliamentary majority. Brigitte Macron also spoke in favor of the reform because apparently the opinion of the first lady is now mattering.

Thanks to the efforts of ‘pedagogy’ of the government, the opposition to the pension reform has... increased to over 70% of the population and has now even reached a majority (59%) among pensioners. Opposition is at 81% among ‘intermediate professions’ and 80% among workers and employees. What could possibly go wrong?

The broader context is anyway quite bad for Macron: the public hospital is collapsing, the mass transit system in Paris and its area is such a mess the joke is now that ‘there is no difference between normal days and strike days’, there has been a controversy about French pundits summoned by the president so he can explain them how to sell the pension reform (only in France) and various scandals hurting the government and the ruling party (a Renaissance deputy who acknowledged having do cocaine, the son of the justice minister being indicted over the accusation of having beat his wife). More worringly for the governement, since several months a series of social conflicts (blocking of refineries, strike of train ticket inspectors, strike of private medical practitioners, protests of bakers) have erupted, mostly organized by groups operating on the fringe or outside of unions. The consequence having been that the government has caught by total surprise by the suddenness, scale and radicalism of such conflicts and found itself without an identified and responsible leadership to dialogue with. Well, maybe unions aren’t that bad after all.

[Sir John Johns]

So Angus, the tl:dr is that there is something about the French language (the French look far too diverse for me to believe it is genetic - Normandy v. Marseilles), that causes people to sit on their ass and malinger, the better to  have more time to shop with other people's money at impromptu port markets where presumably the food fresh off the ship is the most savory. Got it. Thanks.

Smartass.  

Not quite, but indeed language does affect us.  Japanese has 50 words for rain.  Danish has about 100 for snow/ice.  They need them. 

Consider this example:  English has many words for trash receptacle.  Rubbish bin, garbage can, trashcan, wastebin, dustbin, refuse bin, etc.  The French have one:  La Poubelle.  And they didn't have that one till around 1884.  (okay, to be fair they also have la boîte à ordures)  What conclusion could we draw from that?  I'll let you draw your own.

On the other hand, the French have about 10 common ways to say "let's get a drink".  Far more than English. 

This kind of analysis reminds me when Shintaro Ishihara, a Japanese far-right politician, claimed that French was a failed language because it is ‘a language which cannot count numbers’ (tell that to Blaise Pascal, Henri Poincaré, Pierre de Fermat, Augustin-Louis Cauchy or Évariste Galois). Or when French intellectuals publicly guaranteed us that Putin would never invading Ukraine because of the ‘Russian soul’ or would better managing the pandemic than the decadent Western world because of ‘Dostoevsky’. This giving way too much importance to words, just words, as if it could be sufficient to interpret complex and deep political and social phenomenons (something that, ironically, a lot of people are guilty of among the French intelligentsia).

Especially because the examples you are providing are wrong to begin with. I personally don’t know 10 common ways to say ‘let’s get a drink’ and while poubelle has became the most widely used word to designate trash receptacle, there are also corbeille à papier, seau à ordures, bac à ordures, panier à ordures or conteneur à ordures or conteneur à déchets. We even have a word (poubelle de table) to specifically designate the little container where people having a meal dispose of the food waste. It seems there is no equivalent in English language. Should I then conclude that Americans are also eating pistachio shells, olive pits, cheese rinds, chicken skin or the shell and inedible parts of crab? (well this would be in line with the fact Americans have no word to designate what here we are calling terroir, they just don’t care about where their food is coming from). Or that they are just throwing that rubbish on the floor?

The word poubelle is named after Eugène Poubelle, the longtime prefect of Seine département (the official appointed by the government to administer the area covering Paris and its neighboring communes), who introduced at the beginning of his tenure, in December 1883, a system of mandatory and standardized boîtes à ordures. Such system was set up in order to improve garbage collection which had turned into a major problem due to rapid urbanization and development of collective housing. A broadly similar system had already been introduced in Paris in 1870, during the siege of the city by the Prussian army, but had quickly felt into disuse. Until Poubelle and his boîtes, wastes were simply deposited and piled up at the foot of the tenements, ragpickers grabbed what looked like valuable and what remained were collected by dustmen, using a shovel to put the garbage into a horse-drawn dumper (tombereau) touring the neighborhood on regular dates. Then it was discharged in the agricultural lands surrounding Paris, mostly to serve as fertilizer.

When introduced, the boîte à ordures of Prefect Poubelle was vituperated by the bourgeois press (the likes of Le Figaro) for constituting a threat against social hierarchy and as the creation of yet another burden for the landlords (required to supply tenants with the famous boîtes à ordures). Based on libertarian arguments, it was also attacked as an intolerable intrusion of the state in private life, in particular the new obligation to sort out waste and separate organic materials from papers and rags and to put earthenware, glass and oyster shells in a special receptacle (as this kind of debris could hurt the dustmen). Such measure was denounced as the first step towards a totalitarian society in which bureaucrats would have introduced ‘a regulation of mealtimes, of rest time and of the way to make love’.

Poubelle was also attacked in the press on his ‘provincial’ origins (i.e. not being a Parisian) and for not understanding what is the true essence of La Ville Lumière). The same press that had applauded to the bloody repress of the 1871 Paris Commune also suddenly cared about what would happened to the poor ragpickers as they were then suddenly prevented into doing their traditional business. Anyway, the controversy quickly died off and the bourgeois press totally forgot about the ragpickers but the name of Poubelle has remained attached to his boîtes à ordures (see that French academic article for the controversy, bordering media-fabricated moral panic, over the introduction of the poubelles).

Note that while Paris was quite belated into introducing a modern garbage collection system compared to other European main cities, the Americans have absolutely no reason to brag as, according to Wikipedia: ‘In 1895, New York City became the first U.S. city with public-sector garbage management’. This article is indeed painting a sorry situation of New York before 1895:

There are some photographs taken for Harper’s Weekly, before and after photos of street corners in New York in 1893 and then in 1895. And the before pictures are pretty astonishing, people were literally shin-high or knee-high in this muck that was a combination of street gunk, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and furniture crap.

So if you want to draw conclusion from the word poubelle, it may be rather that:

1/ it is deriving from the name of a state official.
2/ it was a word that initially designated a very Parisian thing before spreading out in the whole country, replacing local variations like the bedoucette in Toulouse, and even the rest of French-speaking world.


The reasons for the propensity of French to go on strike must be founded, not much into analysis of the vocabulary but on the political and social organization of France which has led to a situation that can be sum up by French citizens don’t trust their government and the French government don’t trust its citizens. France is organized in a way that political decisions are generally made by the central government in a top-down approach with a complete disregard for consultation and dialogue, a lack of anticipation on the practical arrangements of said decisions and in a spirit of complete disdain for the average French citizen who is considered as an idiot unaware of what is good for him.

Hence the periodic and sudden outburst of social protests in reaction of the (often ill-conceived or misunderstood) policies taken by the government: protests to defend private schools in 1984; protests in favor of public higher education system in 1986; big strikes against Juppé’s pension reform plan in 1995; youth protests against the introduction of a precarious labor contract specifically aiming at young workers in 2006; the Yellow Jackets movement in 2019 (and that is just in the latest decades).

And, at local level, there has been Notre-Dame-des-Landes (opposition to the construction of an airport) in the 2010s or, a bit older, the protests against plans to build a nuclear plant in Plogoff (Finistère) in 1980. This one led to an unbelievable of violence, especially on behalf of the French police (because France has one of the most violent police force among Western democracies), especially incredible because Plogoff was just a 2,500-inhabitant village of fishermen:

One of the women is explaining that Brittany was used as the poubelle of France (this was two years after the huge Amoco Cadiz oil spill and against a background of regional renewal after decades of economic and cultural marginalization) while another woman is saying that villagers started throwing stones at the police because ‘this was all they could do to defend themselves’.

And, just as for all the social movements I have previously mentioned, ultimately the government had to backtrack and drop its plans. Which is a lot of political defeats but maybe if the projects had been better prepared, didn’t have contradicted previous electoral promises and/or hadn’t been forced through...

You can surely found the roots of this brutal and hyper-centralized decision-making process in Louis XIV’s colbertisme and dirigisme (which some people are wrongly conflating with ‘socialism’) if not even before, and has persisted over centuries in spite of the change of regimes and constitutions.

But nothing has changed since the last century and this process has been actually further enhanced in the latest years with the hyper-presidentialism system, the weakening of political parties and social organizations in a broad sense (churches, unions, associations), the undermining of local authorities by the totally aberrant reorganization of the regions decided by Hollande (without voters having a say on this topic, of course) or the unilateral decision taken by Sarkozy and later Macron to suppress the most important sources of financial revenue for communes (professional tax under Sarkozy; housing tax under Macron), and finally the disorganization of the domestic intelligence services under Sarkozy (these ones were helpful for the government to detect potential social unrest and what were the policies that were causing problems at local level).

The map of the share of population having participated in the January and early February protests is also very revealing:

https://twitter.com/flr_louis/status/1626116802508881921

Protests are especially strong in the Northwestern part of France, in first place Brittany (in Finistère, 4.4% of the population went in the streets), in Occitanie and in predominantly rural départements (Ardèche, Hautes-Alpes, Corrèze, Hautes-Pyrénées, Orne). Conversely, there wasn’t proportionally that much protesters in the major urban centers (Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille), except in Paris, the place where demonstrators usually converge because this is the center of power.

And in the Brittany map, the most shocking part are the protests in the tiny islands (Ouessant, Groix) and in very small towns like Pontivy or Ploërmel, which aren’t at all hotbeds of left-wing radicalism.

This is strongly suggesting that protests are going way beyond the rising of retirement age and are also connected to the decay of public services in rural areas and the perceived abandonment and disregard for the peripheral France.

Another divide to add to the pensioners/working population cleavage expressed during the last election (Macron over-performed among retirees compared to the rest of the population) and the generational gap: Macron is exclusively governing for the upper classes and the pensioners while having absolutely nothing to offer to younger generations. Just these last days, a proposal to extend lunches for one euro to all students in public universities (sponsored by the NUPES and endorsed by the RN) has been defeated in the National Assembly by a Renaissance-LR alliance which used incredibly moronic arguments (this would have benefited the sons of billionaires who, as we all know, are attending public universities) to oppose it while there are reports of Macron wanting to extend his lite version of military service (‘national universal service’, SNU) to all young aged 16 in spite of the experience having proven a waste of time and money and having already led to abuses against young participants from the supervising staff.

But, sure we are idiots to not trust a government which is refusing to provide an estimation of the number of people who will enjoyed the new €1,200 minimum pension, either because it is ridiculously low and would undermine the idea it is a social improvement, either because they have just no clue about the effects of their improvised reform.

[Sir John Johns]

Macron is going with the 49-3 because, after having proclaimed there will be a majority in the National Assembly to pass his pension reform, it turns out the number of rebels inside LR, the centrists in the LIOT motley parliamentary group and even inside the Macronist parliamentary groups who would have either abstain either vote against the reform was sufficiently high to not guarantee the approval of such key bill. As a defeat would have been obviously a disaster, Macron choose to ‘play safe’.

But the resort to the 49-3 is politically not much better because the Borne government has spent months negotiating with LR (unlike the unions it decided to totally ignore) to get their approval, even integrating in to the bill a series of concessions that, wait for it, considerably reduce the economic savings the reform is supposed to accomplish (with stuff like mechanisms to increase some small pensions and exemption from social security contributions for businesses hiring senior workers) making the whole exercise largely pointless. In the last line, there were even a threat from Macron to dissolve the National Assembly in case the bill had been rejected (a move that has reportedly convinced some LR to change their vote from... support to abstain in fear of losing their seat in early elections due to the heavy unpopularity of the reform; Macron is such a political genius!). And yet, Borne, who has been appointed the prime minister because of her alleged talents for negotiations, has failed to secure the support of the whole LR caucus (this is of course also a defeat for Éric Ciotti, the biggest loser of the day, who has thrown his support behind the bill but is unable to whip his own deputies) with followers of Bertrand, Pradié and even Wauquiez deciding they would not vote for the reform.

Unlike Mitterrand, who had then to get both the Communists and the Simone Veil-type centrists (not the easiest combo) on board to get important stuff passed, Macron had only LR to convince of the soundness of his reform. And he has failed.

A motion of non-confidence against the Borne government is currently planned to be motioned by Charles de Courson, a center-right maverick deputy sufficiently well-respected to redact a text able to gather support from both the NUPES and the RN without alienating the moderates. Various LIOT and LR deputies have already announced their intention to vote in its favor and, while it has few chances to pass, the result should be relatively close.



The whole episode is anyway a debacle for Macron that absolutely nobody in France is trying to portray as some victory for the president. Even Macronist deputies have expressed their discontent with the use of 49.3, using strong words:

We should have go to the vote. We owed that: to our oppositions, to those who have until now expressed their disagreement with the reform always peacefully and dignity. Defeat or victory in the vote, democracy would have speak.

This has been a mistake to trigger the 49.3 on a bill like that considering the state of our democracy.

Macron is just putting France to fire for a bill:

- whose urgency is highly questionable

- which will not fix the financing problems of the pensions on the long run

- which will not fundamentally reform the pensions system but change only a few parameters

- elaborated and sold in an incredibly amateurish way

- which have been rushed in the parliament without consultation with workers’ organizations and without a willingness to reach a wide consensus

- which have been legitimately and democratically approved in the sole Senate (the non-directly elected high house, which controversially decided to abolish all special pensions schemes but the one of their own members and whose president, Gérard Larcher, refused to disclose the amount of his personal pension of senator)

- which the government deliberately lied about its content as Dussopt, pressed by the NUPES deputy Jérôme Guedj, has been forced to acknowledge the famous €1,200 minimum pension will only benefit 10,000 to 20,000 pensioners each year and not 40,000 as previously announced, only few weeks after several Macronist deputies disingenuously tried to sell its as a minimum universal €1,200 pension.

- that is rejected by a large and growing share of the population as it is perceived as unjust and as disproportionately hurting manual workers and women and is mostly supported by pensioners, i.e. the ones who will not been affected by it.

- that is proposed by a president who got reelected in 2022 while barely campaigning and systematically dodging political debates (bar the ‘mandatory’ runoff one), promised to take into consideration left-wing voters who voted for him in the runoff before totally forgotting about that in the minute following his reelection, got disowned in the subsequent legislative elections by failing to reelect a majority (the only time an elected or reelected president failed to win a parliamentary majority in the subsequent legislative elections with 1988) and decided to act as if the Yellow Jackets movement never happened

- in a context of economic difficulties for poorest households

- in a context of exacerbated distrust in the institutions, at its highest level since the Yellow Jackets protests according to a recent OpinionWay poll for the Cevipof (pdf file)

The French democracy is very ill and what Macron is only doing is making it even sicker.

[Sir John Johns]

- that is rejected by a large and growing share of the population as it is perceived as unjust and as disproportionately hurting manual workers and women and is mostly supported by pensioners, i.e. the ones who will not been affected by it.

Again can someone explain how the pension reform hurts women more than it hurts men according to Sir John from above?

Here an article in English summing up the situation:

Currently, pension rights allow women to leave at 62 and receive the full pension rate if they took their full maternity leave.

But Macron’s pension reform will no longer take this maternity leave into account which means mothers will have to wait two more years before retiring.

"There are two conditions for this increase: you must have worked the full 43 years. But 40% of women retire with an incomplete career," said Sophie Binet, Secretary General of CGT Cadres Union, in charge of gender equality.

"The second condition is that this complete career must be full time and 30% of women work part time. So, not many women will receive this pension increase," she told Euronews.

Back in January, the minister for parliamentary relations, Franck Riester, has publicly acknowledged the reform will hurt more the women, contradicting previous statements from the government about how it will on the contrary reduce gender inequality.

This is a key point that has contributed to the massive rejection of the reform: the government has tried to sell it as a ‘measure of justice’, as a progressive change and even as a ‘left-wing reform’ when it is absolutely none of this. Maybe this would have been worked better if clearly assumed as an austerity measure aiming at saving money but instead the government has insisted with its fable of a progressive reform even after been caught lying on the content of the reform several times.

He even admits it hurts manual workers which I guess is correct but most manual workers especially in heavy and dangerous manual work are men. Women might do other stuff like say hotel cleaning which poses much less risk to their body. The only way I can see it hurting women is that on average they will now retire later because they are more likely to enter and graduate from college.

Some highly feminized jobs are particularly exhausting, physically (and sometimes also psychologically) speaking, like home carers, hospital nurses and nursing home employees, all jobs implying difficult schedules and hard work in critically understaffed sectors (because of cuts and disastrous administrative restructuring in public hospitals; because of the greed of private investors in nursing homes – not an exaggeration, there has been a relatively recent scandal about systemic carelessness of residents in the leading company of the sector, Orpea).


Anyway, the pension reform has still a last step (legally speaking, on political and social levels things could still turn badly for Macron and force him to withdraw the reform) to overcome before being enacted: the Constitutional Council. This is not my cup of tea, but it seems there is a large consensus among legal experts that several dispositions of the reform have strong chances of being axed by the Council for being ‘riders’. Even the whole reform could been dismissed by the Constitutional Council due to the ‘unconventional’ way it has been passed but this is not the most likely outcome.