Since November 2019, unions across France have been staging massive strikes. The transportation union, the Firefighters union, the lawyer’s union, and many others have taken to the streets. Many of these protestors have not been afraid to clash with police or sabotage public transportation. According to The Guardian, when taken together, millions of protesters have struck over the last few months. What has driven a huge portion of the French populace into the streets? According to French political scientist Dominique Moïsi, the culprit is Emmanuel Macron and his government’s new proposals to restructure French retirement plans and pensions. Moïsi says that “There is a deep sense of injustice right now, that inequalities have exploded, that the state is much less protective than it was of the weak, and muchmore protective of the strong.”
Macron’s government is pursuing a massive overhaul of France’s entire pension system. Instead of allowing different unions to manage and arrange their own pension systems and determine their own guidelines on retirement as they have since after World War 2, Macron wants to bring every worker in France into a single pension system with a base retirement age. Macron claims that the goal of this overhaul would be to help streamline and simplify the system to make it more efficient, cheaper, and friendlier to businesses. Economic projections by the French council of retirement have agreed with Macron’s assesment.These assurances of a simpler and cheaper system in the future terrify French workers.
In France, ballet dancers can retire at 42, utility workers at 57, and train drivers may retire at 52. In a New York Times interview, train conductor Stéphane Vardon explained how the unique physical, emotional, and mental tolls of his job are unique from those faced by ballet dancers or lawyers. Vardon has to work long hours with little sleep or food; he knows that these stresses have taken years off of his life and has seen men that trained him when he first started his career die before reaching 65. In the interview, Vardon explains that he is terrified of the prospect of dying before he retires or of not having enough money to live on under the new system.
These fears are shared across France, feeding the discontent that the French people feel with their government. The pension and retirement system that has been in place in France since after the Second World War is the pride of the French worker and, as they have shown, it is not something that they intend to give up lightly.
Joseph Doner - Political Editor