Today, if you are a private employee, when you retire at full rate, you suffer a 10% discount on your supplementary Agirc-Arrco pension. Temporary discount, for 3 years. Unless you agree to work one more year. Strongly criticized, this penalty has every chance of jumping on the occasion of the entry into force of the pension reform. But there needs to be an agreement between employers and unions. What we know about the future of the Agirc-Arrco malus, in 3 questions.
1 – Malus Agirc-Arrco: what is it?
Legal age, full rate, temporary discount… When you’re still a long way from retirement age, these terms are all uncodable jargon. Legal age this is – except for a long career – the age from which you have the right to retire: 62 years old today, soon and gradually 64 years old with the pension reform.
The age of full rateit is not only when you have passed the legal age but also contributed or validated enough quarters to leave full rate (full career), therefore without discount on the basic pension.
For the supplementary pension Agirc-Arrco, reaching the age of the full rate is not enough today. If you leave full rate, you need work another year to avoid the 10% reduction, or the solidarity coefficient: the penalty specific to the Agirc-Arrco scheme. This 10% penalty is temporary: it applies for a maximum of 3 years, and ends in all cases at age 67, even if the 3 years mentioned have not elapsed.
Example. Nadia was born in January 1961. Her legal starting age is 62. She started working around 23 years old and has no children: she will reach the age of the full rate at 65, when she has accumulated 168 quarters (42 years). His future pension: 1,500 euros, including 500 euros in additional. And, as it stands, she will have to wait until she is 66 to leave with a supplement at no discount. If she leaves at age 65, her Agirc-Arrco pension will be temporarily 450 euros due to the effect of the penalty, before returning 500 euros for her 67 years.
Agirc-Arrco: I am retiring. Why am I losing 10% on my complementary?
2 – Why is it called into question by the reform?
Will the malus survive the reform? The question has been around for several weeks. Because the State does not manage Agirc-Arrco: Those are the social partnersemployee unions and employers’ organizations (1)who run this supplementary scheme for more than 13million pensioners… and who will therefore decide the fate of the 10% penalty.
But two arguments undermine this malus. The first: the reform pushes back the starting age. Faced with this finding, this malus supposed to encourage you to work longer still have a reason to be with a legal age of 64 years? Second argument: according to our information, the financial gain of the malus for Agirc-Arrco accounts is almost nil. New figures should come to document the profitability of this device but, according to our information, the incentive is not very effective: the temporary malus would not prevent (or little) those who decided to leave at the age of the full rate to assert their pension rights.
Stalled talks between employers and unions
The national interprofessional agreement (ANI) on the complementary Agirc-Arrco should have been renewed at the beginning of 2023. The last agreement is indeed theoretically valid for the period 2019-2022. In theory, a new ANI was to intervene at the beginning of 2023. Faced with the imminence of a pension reform, the social partners agreed a few months ago to discuss the new ANI once the pension reform file was completed. Except that this painful file is hard to close…
Discussions were supposed to start in June but negotiation has not started yet, slips the CPME. It’s still a little early to decide on the 10% penalty, we hear from the Medef side. Our priority is pension reform: it conditions everything, says Rgis Mezzasalma, CGT technical adviser to Agirc-Arrco, before adding: but employers are in no hurry to open discussions either.
Employers and unions reject the responsibility for discussions at a standstill. But some openly regret this unexpected delay, like Michel Beaugas, confederal FO secretary in particular in charge of pensions. He fears that the discussions will be postponed until September, when he would like to avoid rushing these negotiations.
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3 – When will the social partners decide on the fate of this 10% penalty?
No need to be a guesser to know the fate of the Agirc-Arrco malus: a virtual consensus – alongside unions and employers – is built around the disappearance of the temporary reduction of 10%. At this stage, maintaining the penalty of 10% after the application of the pension reform would be a huge surprise. Only suspense: whether the bonus (reverse device, a supplementary pension enhanced if you work 2 more years after the full rate) is maintained, him.
But the vagueness remains on when the social partners will agree. According to our information, a first informal exchange took place at the beginning of the week. A new exchange must take place at the end of June, with a view to more formal discussions in September before drawing up a new national interprofessional agreement Agirc-Arrco.
We can’t stay on the old deal!
Will the real negotiations to establish a new ANI open end of June? Or in September? Or in extremis in October? thriller. Without a new agreement, the current rules – including the 10% penalty – will continue to apply. However, we can not stay on the old agreement! thunders Michel Beaugas: They want us to postpone the negotiation to be in a hurry. Because the deadline is the next revaluation of the Agirc-Arrco supplementary pension, on November 1, 2023. The decision on the revaluation must take place at the beginning of October.
Clearly: the social partners will have to agree by the end of September or the beginning of October on the Agirc-Arrco agreement. The fate of the 10% penalty could therefore be decided in September 2023, shortly after the now almost inevitable entry into force of the pension reform.
The other hot issues on the menu of the Agirc-Arrco agreement
The question of the 10% penalty is not the most uncertain of the multiple points on the menu of the joint agreement between unions and employers on Agirc-Arrco. The social partners will also have to decide on the governance of the supplementary scheme or the revaluation rules supplementary pension.
Should the annual change in the Agirc-Arrco point be indexed to inflation? Salaries (2)? By keeping a margin to reduce this revaluation like today? Michel Beaugas, of Force Ouverte, pleads to put an end to this margin, for a more automatic indexing. And we must not forget the question of catching up on degraded revaluations for quite a few yearsadds Rgis Mezzasalma, referring to the very good financial health of the Agirc-Arrco scheme.
All the news on the pension reform
(1) Medef, CPME, U2P; and CFDT, CFE-CGC, FO and CGT (the only union not to sign the 2019 agreement).
(2) Based on the average salary per head (SMPT), one of the two elements taken into account to calculate the revaluation currently, with inflation.