It seems quite obvious today that the recent debate on pension reform has not lived up to the challenges. The government’s poor communication on the reform project is only one of the failures of the current debate on the future of the pension system in France. The technical errors and inaccuracies, underlined by my colleague Michaël Zemmour, are damaging to the credibility of the reform, but the absence of analyzes based on the reality of work and its evolution is perhaps even more so.
The justifications presented by the government as common sense arguments actually hide a lack of reflection on the evolution of work and employment that our societies are going through. One of the justifications often put forward is that the extension of the retirement age is justified by the extension of life expectancy. This argument may seem unanswerable, but when you really think about it, it is very insufficient, for several reasons.
Firstly, the raising of the retirement age since the post-war period has taken place in a period of increasing life expectancy, quite the opposite of this “evidence”, SO. It was then one of the many forms of redistribution of productivity gains linked to economic development, as were the main socio-economic advances (minimum wage, reduction in working time, paid holidays, etc.).
Far from the imaginary of the end of work
That being said, the current debate on the reform addresses the question of working conditions very little, or else in a caricatural way. The recent sentence of a senator on the use of exoskeletons by movers, although caricatural, is the reflection of a certain disconnection with the realities of working conditions and technological transformations.
Is it possible today to affirm that the work is less arduous than in the past? Answering this question is not easy, because technological changes in the labor market are continuous and very different in nature according to the categories of workers. It is nevertheless possible, based on several recent works, to invalidate the view that the work would be less arduous.
What can we say about the current and future situation? Recent work suggests a much more ambivalent situation than expected. Far from the imaginary end of work, new technologies tend to replace so-called routine work more specifically. Although partly repetitive, these “routinized” tasks require for some a certain level of qualification and are not always the most physical and painful.
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