Pensions: the government defends the 64-year-old age, as employer-union negotiations approach

The government is sending a message four days before the start of negotiations between employers and unions aimed at amending the contested 2023 pension reform. The Ministers of Labor and Foreign Trade defended this Sunday the maintenance of the legal retirement age at 64. Adopted with great difficulty using Article 49.3 of the Constitution, the last reform had notably raised this age from 62 to 64 years old, then, in mid-January, the new Prime Minister, François Bayrou, had decided to return to the contested text by announcing a "conclave" of renegotiation "without any taboos" .

For the unions, the priority is to go back to the 64 years. The employers exclude any increase in their financial contribution. "If it is to further unbalance the retirement system, I think it is a very serious error (...) for our own public finances, for the refinancing of our debt" , declared the Minister Delegate in charge of Foreign Trade, Laurent Saint-Martin, on the set of LCI, on the subject of a challenge to the 64 years.

"We need to make courageous budgetary choices and these courageous budgetary choices simply mean knowing how to finance and balance a social protection system. And so that involves reforms, particularly those of our retirement insurance, and certainly not going backwards," added the minister. The Minister of Labor, Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet, defended the idea of ​​"working longer" on Franceinfo this Sunday.

Should we go further than the shift in the legal age to 64? "We need to look at all the levers today, it could be the age measurement, it could be the contribution period, it could be the under-indexation" of pensions in relation to inflation, she replied. However, she felt that it was necessary to "take into account" the issue of "arduous careers" , jobs "that are not sustainable for a lifetime" .

The Court of Auditors on Thursday painted a picture of a "worrying" financial situation, and examined several levers without recommending a "global reform" , nor determining the choices "to be favored" , in a diagnosis on which the social partners must rely for their unprecedented rounds of negotiations on pensions.

In a context where the country is facing a public deficit that could reach 6.1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024, well above the 3% tolerated by Brussels, the Minister for Foreign Trade believes that "balancing a social protection model is the ABC" and says he does not see "why France would be incapable of meeting the challenge on this" . On the side of employers' organizations, the president of Medef, Patrick Martin, estimated on Sunday, in the columns of the JDD , that it would be necessary "at a minimum" to maintain the legal retirement age at 64, or even "to push it a little further" . For Patrick Martin, it is necessary to "reinvent the financing" of social protection systems as a whole.

On the side of the employee unions, the priority is to go back to the 64 years. The leader of the CGT, Sophie Binet, recalled during the week that "the objective of the CGT" is still "to repeal this unfair and violent reform" , which would cost "10 billion euros" , a figure according to her "entirely sustainable" . The number 1 of the CFDT, Marylise Léon, expects "a movement on the legal age, the recognition of arduous jobs" and the improvement of women's rights.