Lhe aging of the French population is confirmed. In its latest report on evolutions and perspectives of pensions in France “, the Pensions Orientation Council (COR) predicts that the average life expectancy at age 60 will reach 29.3 years for men and 31.3 years for women in 2070.
Such an evolution has never happened before, which allows former minister Michèle Delaunay to redefine France as a ” longevity society » and to the economist Maxime Sbaihi to describe the situation as « great aging “.
An incentive to quit
For nearly thirty years, to cope with ageing, the various governments have reformed using only the parameter of the legal retirement age with, as a corollary, the number of quarters of contribution required for a full pension. Since the “Balladur reform” of July 22, 1993, political leaders have constantly urged the French to work longer. As a result, successive legislation places an increasingly heavy responsibility on those who work to finance the pensions of those who no longer work.
This intergenerational solidarity has a cost and is giving rise to increasingly virulent controversies. Thus, Maxime Sbaihi asks “ to better distribute between the ages the collective efforts to be made in the face of a demographic revolution for which no one is responsible » (The Great AgingEditions de l’Observatoire, 2022), while François de Closets likens boomers to ” a generation that lived on the hooks of its children » (The parenthesis boomersFayard, 2022).
If the parametric reforms have their justification on the budgetary level, they ignore the unemployment of seniors. Because by dint of postponing the legal retirement age, politicians have ended up encouraging people to become unemployed. By a law of December 18, 1963, the government of Georges Pompidou (1911-1974) began by authorizing the negotiation of early retirement agreements in companies.
In 1972, another law instituted the guarantee of resources, by which the State undertook to pay allowances to seniors who were involuntarily deprived of work and could not yet benefit from retirement pensions. On June 13, 1977, a national inter-professional agreement extended the payment of these allowances to resigning seniors.
Companies have kept the habit of getting rid of the oldest of their employees as soon as it proves necessary to carry out restructuring
You have 57.03% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.