A mountain of 16.000 amendments awaits the pension reform law, under discussion in Parliament in France. And after the massive demonstration on Saturday 11 February, the unions are preparing for a new day of mobilization on 7 March. A call for a general strike cannot be ruled out. Why did French unions declare war on Emmanuel Macron's pension reform? And above all, how did it happen that the French president lost the support of the first national trade union – the CFDT (comparable to our Cisl as a political grouping) – now sided with the CGT?
Pension reform: missed opportunities
An article by Jean-Marcel Bouguereau, published by La République del Pyrénées, helps to understand the difficulties of a reform that proves to be difficult to understand for the French. And above all, it offers the opportunity to “return to missed opportunities, especially with CFDT secretary Laurent Berger who could have been allied with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, an ideal partner for an agreement with the CFDT”. In fact, Borne was an adviser to Lionel Jospin and Minister of Labor in the government of Jean Castex.
Everything starts from the abandonment of the pension to which points Lawrence Berger was in favour: “Since the Congress of Tours of the CFDT in 2010, we have been campaigning for a systemic reform of pensions. But on the sole condition that it is fair and disconnected from parametric elements as Emmanuel Macron promised in his programme".
The problem is that “with his new pension reform, Macron has contradicted himself and, in doing so, has deprived himself of a precious ally. Above all, the president has proved himself wrong,” writes La République. And again: “Hadn't he estimated in 2019 “every drop in the legal age as hypocritical” and assured that he would leave “62 as the legal age, since we are carrying out a more profound reform, which is to create a new points system”?
The points pension and the parametric reform: the age taboo
In Emmanuel Macron's initial reform ambitions, the idea was to completely overhaul the system by instituting a pension calculated exactly the same for everyone. Macron has abandoned this objective "because of Édouard Philippe, who is a mystic of the pivotal age and therefore of a "parametric" reform, one that moves only the parameters, i.e. the duration of contributions, the legal starting age or the contribution rate”, writes the French newspaper. By choosing the measure of age - financially efficient but socially expensive - Macron "has crossed the red line drawn by the CFDT since 1998. Because Laurent Berger has not forgotten that Macron had promised, since 2017, to implement the grand design of the CFDT" .
