Lhe right to a dignified retirement after a working life is one of the pillars of the social contract between the French, the social partners and the State. Moreover, it is enough for a government to mention a reform of the retirement system to witness a massive outcry and see to what extent the subject is of capital importance for our social cohesion.
Each employee can today get a fairly precise idea of their retirement rights and how much they will be entitled to when the day comes, through a simple calculation. But this is not the case for self-employed workers. In fact, they have no visibility on the validation of their quarters and cannot carry out a simulation of their future pension.
The fault lies in a Kafkaesque administrative complexity: due to changing contribution bases, percentages allocated in these same contributions, additions to basic pensions and possible supplementary pensions, the future for the self-employed is incalculable . And as long as their careers are choppy or alternating, the subject takes a surreal turn. In addition, no one knows what part of the contributions paid by self-employed people is allocated to their retirement.
Neither Urssaf, nor the regional retirement insurance and occupational health funds (Carsat), nor the National Old Age Insurance Fund (CNAV), in short all the institutions whose role is collection and redistribution of pensions, do not have clear information to provide to self-employed people on their retirement rights. These actors on the ground are, despite themselves, kept in technical limbo which prevents them from carrying out their intelligence mission.
Perverse but logical effect
Ultimately, we are unable to answer the thousands of self-employed people who have questions: “After all these years of working and declaring, how much will I get? how many quarters do I validate for each of my contribution payments? How much will my rights be and how can I monitor their progress? At what age could I stop? »… So many unanswered questions, even though a large number of self-employed people, formerly or at certain times employees, have visibility on the rights generated by their salary-based income. It is all the more incomprehensible for them not to benefit from the same transparency throughout their entire professional career.
Worse, a perverse but logical effect arises from this uncertainty: the absence of a convincing answer pushes some people into undeclared work, and destroys their confidence in the welfare state. One more gap between the French and their institutions.
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