“Resistance to the government’s plan to push back the
retirement age is not just about working longer. It springs from a deep sense
of what defines France as a nation.
Monday is line dancing; Tuesday scrapbooking with friends;
Wednesday caring for her two grandchildren.
Martine Mirville’s itinerary is an advertisement for retirement
in France.
After decades of working, much of it as a secretary, she
packed up her desk for the last time, bought an apartment in this seaside town
in Normandy where her daughter lives, and started the coveted next stage of her
life.
“I wake up every morning and say how lucky am I to be here,”
said Ms. Mirville, 67, during a break from her Thursday morning gym class.
Then, she used a favored French expression that has been echoing across the
country in protests this year: “This is the time to enjoy life.”
Since President Emmanuel Macron’s government introduced
plans to push the retirement age back from 62 to 64, France has been convulsed
by regular strikes and protests that have drawn millions into the streets, not
only in the capital, but in towns and villages across the country.
On Tuesday, workers walked out of schools, refineries, power
plants, airports and transportation systems in the biggest mobilization yet,
trying to all but turn out the lights in the country in protest.
The government’s plan has struck a deep and sensitive nerve
in a society that cherishes retirement and reveres a generous balance between
work and leisure perhaps more than any other Western industrial country.
France’s attachment to retirement is complex, touching on
its history, identity and pride in social and labor rights that have been hard
won.
They will not be easily forfeited, no matter how many times
the government argues that changing the pension system is imperative to save
it, given the demographic realities confronting the country.
When it was introduced by the National Resistance Council
after World War II, the retirement system — along with national health care —
was part of a series of celebrated social measures intended to help bind the
fractured country together.
It was designed so active workers pay the pensions of their
elder generation, creating interdependence, “so we don’t necessarily want to
fight one another,” explained Bruno Chrétien, president of the Institute for
Social Protection. “It built a kind of social peace.”
The problem today is that the baby boomers have retired and
are living much longer than when the system was devised, while the system’s
motor — the younger work force that pays for their pensions — is not keeping
up.
Mr. Macron and his government say that the pension system is
in “an increasingly precarious state” and that his proposed change is
“indispensable” to put it on firmer financial footing.
The French, polls show, are overwhelmingly opposed to
retiring later.
“We are capable of being as productive as Americans. But
don’t forget, life is not just about working,” said Hervé Bossetti, 58, a money
manager at his fifth protest snaking through Paris last month, dressed in a striped
prisoner’s uniform, carrying a ball and chain, and wearing a sign that said,
“Prisoner of work.”
He added, “In France, we believe that there is a time for
work and then a time for personal development.”
In Granville, a town perched on a cliff overlooking the
English Channel in the north of France that was proclaimed the best place to
retire by Le Figaro in 2022, the allure of retirement is on full display.
Restaurants, cafes, museums and theaters are full of seniors
— who make up 45 percent of the town’s population.
The Inter-Age University offers dozens of courses, from
Russian to contemporary history.
The town supports more than 100 clubs and charitable
organizations.
“It’s the first time in my life I’ve been onstage,” said
Catherine Iacovelli-Hamon, 62, who moved to town about three years ago, after
selling the tobacco and newspaper shop in Caen that had soaked up six days a
week of her life for 20 years. Her pension covers about three-quarters of her
last salary — enough to travel, and go to restaurants and the theater. “All the
things we could not do, finally, we are doing them.”
After World War II, only one-third of people lived to see
retirement. Those who did, got access to just 20 percent of their former salary
for a handful of years before dying.
Since then, France’s pension payments and life expectancy
have both ballooned.
Today, the average French pensioner is richer than the
general population, accessing roughly 75 percent of their previous earnings
with fewer expenses.
In France, 4.4 percent of retirees live below the poverty
line — one of the lowest rates in the 38-nation Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
Instead of just three years, the average French person will
spend more than a quarter of their life — from 22 years for men, to 26 for
women — in retirement, and much of that in good shape, which French statisticians
measure as “life expectancy without disability.” Those who made it to 65 in
2021 could expect another 11 to 12 good years, on average, according to French
government statistics.
No longer a short reprieve before death, retirement is now
seen as “the afternoon of life, a time that is blessed,” said Serge Guérin, a
professor of sociology specializing in old age at Iseec Business College in
Paris.
“It’s a time of liberty, to finally enjoy your
grandchildren, your interests, your desire to travel, to volunteer and be
elected in your community.”
It is also seen as compensation for working life.
“There is this vision in France,” Mr. Guérin added, “that
working time is time waiting to be able to enjoy life.”
Many retirees in Granville were hard at work in a metal
hangar, putting the finishing touches on their handmade floats for the town’s
annual carnival. Jean-Paul Doron was painting a chest to be filled with
confetti. Now 70, Mr. Doron began work at 18 as a metal worker, and later
became a warehouse stocker at France Télécom — the former national telephone
company that became synonymous with horrific work culture in France, after
dozens of employees committed suicide and managers were sent to jail for “institutional
moral harassment.”
“People shouldn’t wait for retirement to have liberty,” said
Mr. Doron. “The young need to fight for working conditions that are respectable
to them.”
The French labor code outlines specific hazardous
conditions, offering workers exposed to things like extreme temperatures or
night shifts points that can go toward early retirement. However, only 15
percent of French workers were entitled to points under this system, according
to a recent Ministry of Labor report.
That hardly captures the overbearing sense of pressure
French workers, filling protests, describe using the same term — “pénibilité,”
which roughly translates to “hardship.”
Researchers say the culture of the French workplace remains
largely hierarchical and increasingly stressful.
“People say, ‘My work weighs on me. I don’t necessarily have
health problems, but I find it difficult to withstand.’ They talk about
pressure, always working at a fast speed, never being allowed the time to
finish a job in peace. But there aren’t any points for that,” said Annie
Jolivet, an economist and researcher at the Center for Employment and Labor
Studies.
Ironically, around three quarters of French workers have
consistently expressed satisfaction with their work repeatedly in surveys over
the past twenty years. They have also said, repeatedly, they’d like to retire
as early as possible.
“It’s a place of contradictions,” said Bertrand Martinot, a
workplace economist and fellow at the right-leaning Montaigne Institute, whose
recent report showed a large majority of the French were satisfied at work, but
most found their work hard, and almost half said they thought the current
retirement age of 62 was already too late. “This shows there is an essential
schism in France, but the story is more complicated than just ‘work is a
horror.’”
One explanation Mr. Martinot offers is distrust of
government. Another is that by changing the age of retirement, the state is
breaking an unspoken promise to workers.
“It’s a kind of contract that’s been signed with the state,”
he said. “People will accept intense work, and a low salary, if they have a
long retirement, with a good quality of life.”
Mr. Chrétien, the director of the Institute for Social
Protection, offers another theory: That the French social protection system
built after World War II came at a time when France’s international status as a
superpower was eclipsed by the United States.
The social protection scheme, he said, “became an element of
national pride.”
“We are not as powerful, but still, we have something others
don’t — the best social protection system in the world that is extremely
generous and extremely costly.”
The pension system is the biggest part of that social
protection system.
“In some way," Mr. Chrétien said, “the French are
experiencing the postponement of retirement as a very questioning of their
identity.””
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