French opposition to pension reform has nothing to do with a 'work-shy' attitude
The first key factor driving the current protests is the contents of the proposed pension reforms themselves. The reform will change the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64, while requiring 43 years of contributions to retire on a full pension. Picture: AP/Jeremias Gonzalez
Recent weeks have seen huge crowds take to the streets across France to protest the Macron administration’s plans to push back the legal pension age.
While some of the international coverage has relied on reductive stereotypes of the French as work-shy radicals congenitally inclined to protest, the reality on the ground in a society that has higher productivity than the EU average and among the lowest unionisation rates in Western Europe is profoundly different.
Opposition to the reforms among the French public is less the product of a historical tradition of protest, a predisposition to slack off work or manipulation by militant trade unions than it is the result of a profound and widely shared rejection of the imposition of a neoliberal political and economic order that erodes workers’ rights.
The first key factor driving the current protests is the contents of the proposed pension reforms themselves. The reform will change the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64, while requiring 43 years of contributions to retire on a full pension.
Although the current legal pension age stands at 62, the average age of retirement in France is 64.5, slightly above the EU average. The reform will particularly impact lower-paid workers, who often need the full pension to survive and thus cannot aspire to an earlier retirement.
It will also affect those who started their careers young, again often in lower paid, “unskilled” and physically demanding jobs, who may now have to work an extra two years before retiring.
The economist Elena Bassoli has highlighted how the new regime disproportionately disadvantages women, whose career trajectories are often interrupted by maternity leave and caring responsibilities.
Such inequalities have even been acknowledged by government ministers, which is particularly problematic for the government given its initial presentation of the reform as an act of "social justice".
The minister for labour, Olivier Dussopt, constantly trumpeted the reform’s increase of the minimum full pension to €1,200, a measure that had the potential to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of poorer pensioners.
However, when economists critical of the reform soon pointed out how limited the measure’s impact would be, Mr Dussopt was forced to admit it would likely only apply to 20,000-40,000 pensioners, out of a total of 5m earning less than €1200. This was symptomatic of a broader unravelling of the government’s social justice claim.
Ultimately, the Macron administration reverted to a financial and demographic justification for the reform. However, it found itself somewhat hamstrung by its own Council on the Orientation of Retirements, whose report was relatively relaxed about the urgency of reform to guarantee the financial stability of the pension system and offered a number of alternative solutions to the pushing back of the retirement age.
Increasing employer and employee contributions has been promoted as a potentially fairer solution by some opponents of the project, especially given the administration’s recent measures to reduce a range of other charges on businesses. Here the famous TINA (there is no alternative) line favoured by advocates of neoliberal reforms like this one has proven particularly hard to sustain.
The strong political resistance in France to the inevitability of the neoliberal model has also compromised the law’s passage through parliament. Although Emmanuel Macron, a champion of neoliberal reforms, secured re-election in April 2022, he did so relying on the support of many left-wing voters in the second round, who swallowed their hostility towards his agenda to prevent the election of an extreme-right president.
This means that evocations of his re-election to defend the democratic legitimacy of his reform ring somewhat hollow. The subsequent failure of his supporters to win an overall majority in the legislative elections of June 2022 has bedevilled the efforts of his technocratic prime minister Élisabeth Borne to steward the reform through parliament in the face of stiff opposition from the left and the extreme right.
Ultimately the government’s (ab)use of constitutional prerogatives to limit the debate and a raft of concessions to the small group of centre-right deputies proved insufficient to guarantee the bill would pass.
It had to rely on an exceptional article of the constitution to push through the reform without a vote. This has further eroded the legitimacy of an already deeply unpopular reform pursued by an increasingly unpopular president.
The scale and consistency of the protests, coupled with the enduring unity of the trade union movement, have surprised many.
In response, President Macron has sought to frame debate around the question of public order, denouncing some of the more radical tactics of sections of the protest movement, while largely uncritically endorsing the severe repressive practices of the French police.
While time will tell if this is effective in delegitimising the movement in the short term, it runs the risk of further legitimising the extreme right, with Marine Le Pen poised to gain votes among both those who oppose the reform and those who fear the potential disorder that opposition to it may provoke.
The ultimate cost of Macron’s pension reform may be far more than the already substantial erosion of retirement rights in France: it may lead to the extinction of the republican regime itself.
- Dr Dónal Hassett is a lecturer in French at UCC who teaches on topics relating to the history, the politics and the societies of France and the wider Francophone world
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