By wanting to raise the legal retirement age to 65, Emmanuel Macron is taking up a formidable challenge: that of the employment of seniors. France represents a counter-example – or an anti-model – in this area, with a percentage of working sixties which is among the lowest of the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A situation that has been identified for a long time but that successive governments, despite vibrant professions of faith, have not really tackled head-on – including during the first five-year term of the re-elected president.
The figures give an idea of the scale of the task. Admittedly, the proportion of seniors in employment has increased over the past two decades. In the fourth quarter of 2021, 56.1% of people aged 55 to 64 held a job, 18.4 points more than in the first three months of 2003, according to a note from Dares – the department responsible for studies at the Ministry of Labour. This increase is attributable, in large part, to the measures taken over the past two to three decades to delay the age of opening of pension rights and to restrict the mechanisms for early retirement (early retirement, in particular).
But the situation is very disparate, if we examine the statistics more closely. Thus, only 35.5% of women and men aged 60 to 64 had a job in 2021, according to Dares. This percentage has been rising since the beginning of the 21stand century, but the most recent data allowing international comparisons to be made show that France is at the back of the pack: in 2019, the employment rate for this age group (thus 60-64 year olds) was 32.7%, compared to 70% in Sweden, 61.8% in Germany and 52.4%, on average, at the level of OECD member states.
Another big black spot: a good number of individuals at the end of their careers go through more or less long periods of unemployment or inactivity before being able to claim payment of their pension. Thus, over the 2018-2020 period, the proportion of women and men aged 61 who are neither employed nor retired was 27.67% on average, compared to 15.2% over the 2013-2015 period, according to statistics provided by the Pensions Orientation Council (COR).
A kind of tacit pact
“There is a disconnect between the age at which people leave the labor market and the age at which they apply for the payment – or liquidation – of their pension: the former barely exceeds 60 years on average, while the second is a little over 62 years old”, deciphers Anne-Marie Guillemard, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris-Descartes at the Sorbonne. Such a hiatus, she explains, is due to the fact that many employees stop working definitively, once they reach the age of sixty, but have to wait a certain time before asserting their right to retirement, because they do not meet the required conditions. “It should not, in fact, be lost sight of that 42% of individuals who liquidate their pension are no longer in activity, having left the labor market for various reasons”, emphasizes Anne-Marie Guillemard. In some cases, they have been unemployed for one or more years; in others, they are in a situation of disability or recipients of a social minimum…
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