France: understanding the protests against Macron's pension reform
Emmanuel Macron's law increasing the French state pension age from 62 to 64 has sparked protests across the country.
In January, the French government announced the imminent introduction of a new pension reform that aims to increase the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 and lengthen the contribution period from 42 to 43 years for most workers.
French president Emmanuel Macron has defended this decision as a way to find a "financial balance", which will allow the survival of the current pension reform against the decreasing workforce and prevent the national debt from increasing. His former government had already tried to initiate the changes in 2019, but they were interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
This unpopular reform sparked weekly protests in January and February and more widespread and disruptive protests in March and April after the government invoked the Constitution’s Article 49.3.
This article allows the government to pass a law without a vote by MPs in the National Assembly where the pension reform had faced opposition from several parties.
Despite the street protests and the divisions within the National Assembly, the reform was passed in the Senate and its legality was validated by the Constitutional Council on April 14.
The text was subsequently signed into law on April 15, and the government has planned to gradually implement it from September 2023 to 2030.
Undeterred, several trade unions have vowed to continue opposing the reform and have invited workers to return to the streets on several occasions, including on June 6. The last major mobilisation on May 1 counted around 782,000 people according to the Ministry of the Interior and 2.3 million people according to the national trade union centre 'General Confederation of labour' (CGT).
Even after former president Nicolas Sarkozy increased France’s retirement age from 60 to 62 in 2010, the country's retirement age has remained one of the lowest in Europe.
The protests did not come as a surprise in France where most social reforms are met with opposition and strikes. But the country’s response to what in other countries seemed like a logical, minor change has opened the debate on France’s unionist culture and pension system.
In the current “pay-as-you-go” system funded by employees’ contributions, French workers can retire at 62 but they do not receive the full state pension if they haven’t met the required number of contributions calculated in trimesters through their career.
However, they can receive the full state pension regardless of their contributions if they choose to retire at 67. Several “special regimes” with advantages in terms of contributions and retirement age are attributed to certain workers with arduous professions or medical conditions.
Emeritus Professor in social sciences at the University of Bordeaux, François Dubet, thinks the protests and political debates in the last few months have failed to address one of the most important aspects of this topic.
He said: “In the 1960s - a boom decade thanks to economic growth - we had some four workers contributing to every pensioner for about 10 years, whereas today we have 1.5 workers paying for one pensioner who lives for about 20 years.
“The French pay a lot of taxes and they’re redistributed much more than in the UK, which means there are much fewer social inequalities, but this system has become very complicated and hard to interpret, so nobody understands it anymore. In these circumstances, everybody feels like they’re being cheated.
“Besides, this debate on pension reform is characteristic of the French system, which is extremely technocratic, bureaucratic and incomprehensible for many people. It leads to populist rhetoric and false answers to real problems, like ‘just make the rich pay’.”
As observed worldwide, France’s population is continuously ageing. The workforce is expected to reduce in the next decades while the number of people above the age of 60 is expected to increase. The number of older people in France exceeded the number of people under 20 years old in 2020 (26.2% of people over 60 compared to 24.4% of people under 20). This gap is expected to widen until 2030 (29.6% of over 60 compared to 23% of under 20).
Despite these figures, the modification of the retirement age has become a symbol of frustration to many, and the unions were able to lead large and unified mobilisations aiming to express this frustration across the country.
Dr Davide Gallo Lessere, a lecturer at the Institut de Paris for the University of London, has studied the mobilisations against several social reforms in the last few years.
He said: “Pensions are important everywhere but France’s peculiarity is its capacity to mobilise and the movement we saw in 2016 against the labour bill and all the reforms that followed somehow prepared the ground for this uprising.
"There were several waves of protest in France prior to the pandemic, like the mobilisations against another labour bill in 2017, the strikes in response to the rail reform and the occupation of universities by students protesting against a reform targeting the higher-education system in 2018 and, of course, the widespread yellow-vest protests in 2018.
“This wave has recently ended up with the first mobilisation against the pension reforms, in which we saw the big role played by the grass and roots components of the unions. But beyond them, this mobilisation to some extent has integrated and articulated all the sectors of society that we saw in previous years, from 2016 to the Yellow Vests.”
Jean-Marie de Beaumont, a member of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT) and former union representative at Airbus, thinks the reform was rushed and imposed at the wrong time.
“There was really no rush and it was the wrong time to do this with the end of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the purchasing power crashing down with the inflation," he explained.
“Everything was poorly calculated except the protests which gathered millions of people every time.”
Conscious of the political struggle centring on an ageing population and the pension system, the CFDT offered alternative ideas which aimed to avoid changing the retirement age, like asking companies to make contributions to their employees’ pension schemes.
De Beaumont said: “The CFDT was originally engaged with politicians and Macron in the discussions around the pension system but it all fell apart during the Covid-19 pandemic. Afterwards, talks broke down and gave place instead to lies and denials of truth, like when Macron accused the CFDT of not offering suggestions, while the union had kept doing just that all along."
Photo by Morgane and Sarah Guillou
Photo by Morgane and Sarah Guillou
Photo by Morgane and Sarah Guillou
Photo by Morgane and Sarah Guillou
The real weight of French trade unions
The trade union basis in France is however very weak. On average, only one employee out of 10 is a union member.
Their number dropped in the 1990s thanks to the economic stability experienced during that decade, and unions have struggled to attract more members ever since.
Unlike rules observed in countries like Sweden, people are not compelled to join a union and contribute to its funding when they enter the labour market.
Nonetheless, French trade unions are enshrined in the constitution and are often included in the decision-making process of reforms affecting the workforce.
Professor Dubet called this a paradox.
He said: “The unions are very weak in companies where they only have a few members, but they enjoy strong institutional recognition which is quite different to post-Thatcher England."
Professor Dubet also established a comparison with German trade unions, which are more powerful and have the ability to negotiate with the government and subsequently avoid strikes and mobilisations, while French trade unions rarely negotiate and engage in more strikes.
He explained: “French unions have a powerful ability to mobilise, which has grown stronger in recent years with the weakening of both the image of political parties and their impact on the public."
On this point, University of London’s Dr Gallo Lessere added: “The unions and the leftist party in France have the capacity to lead mobilisations around social causes but they remain within an institutional framework, so it’s only when students and workers beyond the institutions also join the movements that we enter a new phase of mobilisations.”
Is France going through a constitutional crisis?
The government’s use of the Constitution’s Article 49.3 in March has sparked even more indignation and protests due to its imposing nature.
Macron's party "En Marche" lost its absolute majority in the Assembly following last year's general elections, and this measure was used to secure a quick passing of the law despite the circumstances.
It is the 11th time that the current government invoked this article, which has also been used hundredth of times by other governments since the introduction of France’s Fifth Republic by Charles de Gaulle in 1958.
But even if they were aware of the political objections to the law in Parliament, De Beaumont and the CFDT did not expect this measure since the government had initially discarded it.
De Beaumont said: “The problem is that the government doesn’t listen to us when we protest peacefully. They didn’t listen to us from the beginning and as a result, they passed the law with the 49.3 because they knew they could lose the vote in Parliament since half of the Republican side didn’t want this reform, so they took this decision from one day to the next.”
In this case, Macron and his government escaped a potential parliamentary vote of no confidence, but this approach has raised questions about the current Constitution and administration.
Some MPs and researchers like Dr Gallo Lassere have spoken of a “constitutional crisis”, while others like Professor Dubet consider it a political one. Both however agree on the potential impact this approach could have on the country's future.
Dr Gallo Lassere explained: "We had bigger protests with more people in the streets on several occasions in the past but this current crisis has penetrated the walls of the institutions and become a government and constitutional crisis, which could have an impact on the future of this country.
"Macron doesn’t seem to want to back down in any circumstances and he was often harshly criticised for it - even by moderates.”
Meanwhile, for Professor Dubet: “The constitution was respected and applied, so we can’t speak of a constitutional crisis. However, we can speak of a political crisis since we have a constitutionally legitimate power that is profoundly becoming a minority in the opinion, but this opinion has no political alternative either. If we had a vote tomorrow, not one party would get the majority and it would probably be for the far right party to arbitrate.
“Macron is also in a very difficult position since the French system is quite centralised and the president crystallizes all of the hostility because he is at the centre of the game.
"Several constitutionalists in France consider this to be a democratic deficit and start to consider a change of constitution.”
Can we expect other modifications in the pension system?
With the on-going inflation and demographic changes, many French workers expect further changes in the pension system in the future.
If Macron’s successors follow up on his social and economic policies, these expectations could become reality.
“I see it as a consolidation of neoliberalism, which started at the end of the 1960s, and was reinforced in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated after the 2008 economic crisis and the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis," Dr Gallo Lessere explained.
“It has accelerated social tensions in several countries like Spain, Greece, and France now. These issues are not just French but also Europeans and the reforms have a real impact on the budget and French pensions, which are quite different from other countries’.”
Speaking on behalf of his union and other workers opposed to the reform, De Beaumont expressed his apprehension about the future.
“I am afraid that they might tell us again in 10 years that the pension funding has reached its limits.
“But at the CFDT, we think it will affect the most vulnerable and we are quite intransigent against the loss of our advantages because we think things can be done differently.”
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