Any attempt to raise the retirement age from 60 would encounter widespread opposition, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAICin Paris
TWO MONTHS short of his 61st birthday, Philippe Bourreau is absorbed these days by the all-consuming task of compiling the dreaded dossier.
For weeks he has been poring over his files for proof of how he has spent each of the past 41 years, searching through old boxes for the certificate from his military service and painstakingly copying the payslips he piled up in his long career in the insurance business. “It’s long and tedious,” he says of the experience.
Once all the jigsaw pieces are in place, he hopes finally to satisfy the authorities that he is eligible to retire.
Bourreau’s tone is unmistakably rueful. Unlike a great many of his compatriots, for whom retirement at 60 is one of the precious gifts of the French way of life, he never looked forward to this day. “I wasn’t one of those people who, 10 years ago, dreamed of my retirement and all the travelling or all the fishing I’d get to do,” he says. “It wasn’t a great desire of mine.”
Bourreau, who lives in the Paris suburb of Saint Cloud, would keep working if he could, but he has been out of a job since he had to close his small business a few months ago due to lack of capital. With little hope of finding a new job, he feels he has no alternative.
More than any other domestic issue, the French pension system has become the focus of public debate in recent weeks, and Bourreau has been taking a keen interest. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has made overhauling the system the priority of his remaining two years in power, setting himself up for confrontation with the powerful trade-union movement and – not unlike Barack Obama’s efforts to reform US healthcare – investing himself in a task that could go some way to defining his troubled presidency.
As consultations began last week between the government, employers and unions, the scale of the pensions malaise became alarmingly clear. A long-awaited report by the government’s pensions advisory council forecast that the system faces a funding shortfall of about €40 billion in 2015, rather than the deficit of €15 billion predicted only three years ago, and the “black hole” could rise to as much as €114 billion by 2050.
The government has ruled out cutting benefits, which means longer contribution periods and a rise in the age at which someone can retire on full pension – currently 60, though many have to work longer – are the remaining options on the table.
Raising the retirement age has two clear advantages from the government’s perspective. First, it is the measure that would bring the quickest return for the State. And second, ministers believe financial markets and the European Commission would see it as the clearest sign that France is serious about reforming the system at a time when other European countries – Ireland and Germany included – are considering raising their legal retirement ages to 68.
However, Eric Aubin, head of pensions at the powerful CGT union, insists retirement at 60 is non-negotiable. “I don’t think employees are ready to accept another reverse in the form of an extension of the legal age of retirement or the period of contribution,” he says.
The attachment to the 60-year threshold is not merely a symbolic vestige of another time, he believes, but a reflection of another particularité française: the extent to which poor conditions have damaged the relationship between the French and their work.
“In France, beyond 50 years of age, employees count the days and years before they get to leave their job,” he says. “Whereas in Sweden, opinion polls show that employees get on well with their employers and are happy to work beyond 60.”
Medef, the main employers’ organisation, is in favour of raising the pension age from 60 to 63.5 years and stresses the urgency of reform. “If in 1983 we had kept the legal retirement age at 65, today the debate would be about whether we should raise pensions and by how much, about whether we could reduce contributions, and what should we do with the reserves at our disposal,” says Medef president Laurence Parisot. “We’d be enjoying a surplus.”
In January, Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry broke something of a taboo when she said the retirement age would “certainly” have to go to 61 or 62, but was forced to backtrack immediately when faced with strong internal opposition.
The party’s official position is to defend the 60-year rule introduced by Socialist former president François Mitterrand.
Since its success in last month’s regional elections, the Socialist Party feels no inclination to make life easier for Sarkozy by rowing in behind his proposals. Instead, it suggests the deficit should be reduced through higher taxes for the rich.
The Socialists and the unions are fully aware that their positions are closest to public opinion. Some 80 per cent of those surveyed for a poll by RTL radio last week agreed that reform was needed, but only 39 per cent supported the idea of working until they were older.
For its part, the Elysée Palace knows there is little hope of talking the unions around to its position and that its best hope is to give them just enough to ensure the new law does not provoke open confrontation on the streets this autumn, by which time it hopes to table a draft law.
With the presidential election looming in two years’ time, Sarkozy will have vivid memories of 1995, when a previous attempt to reform the pension system paralysed Jacques Chirac’s centre-right government and left it badly weakened.
In a surprise election just two years later, the right lost its hold on government with its lowest score in half a century.