“For the younger generations, the impression of a generalized scam”

In Work less to live better. Guide for an anti-productivist philosophy (Dunod, 2021), Céline Marty, associate professor and researcher in philosophy of work, questions the centrality of work in our lives. Contrary to the current pension reform project, which plans to work more, it looks at the aspirations to ” to slow down “ expressed by part of the youth.

Do the uncertainties about the future, which have returned with the pension reform, weigh on the relationship to work of the younger generations?

The principle of pay-as-you-go retirement is based, above all, on confidence in the future and a social pact of reciprocity. For the younger generations, this relationship of trust has been abused, and is now broken. With the various reform projects, mistrust has emerged: the impression of a generalized scam, where the younger generations are called upon to finance the pensions of the elderly for longer and longer, with less and less certainty of being able to enjoy, one day, of the same break as the latter.

Faced with the climate crisis, many of them are also wondering about the conditions in which we will have to work in the next few decades – which are not taken into account at all in the calculations. technocratic decisions on the extension of working life. What would it still mean to work at 64, in a world 3 degrees warmer?

How is the climate issue central to young people’s reflections on the reform?

The young generations involved, those who find themselves in particular in militant organizations such as Youth for Climate, indeed underline the ecological consequences of the pension reform. They point to the productivist logic that underlies this project to extend working hours, which depletes workers and natural resources. For these young people, this reform appears to be an ecological aberration when everything calls us, on the contrary, to slow down.

She is often accused, for this, of “laziness” by some of her elders. Are we facing a lazy generation?

This caricatural criticism aims to evacuate the proposals made by part of this generation around a less alienating job. Wanting to flourish outside the sole framework of employability and productivism does not imply laziness. We have clearly seen this with the question, raised since the reform project, of the fundamental, but non-commercial, social importance of pensioners in the vitality of associations or child care.

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