History of pensions in France, what is happening?

The project of the French Executive to increase the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years has left several protests in France. The pension reform promoted by Emmanuel Macron raises the full contribution career from 42 to 43 years and that has angered the spirits of the French and has caused ten days of demonstrations till the date. In the last one, more than two million people took to the streets, compared to 3.5 million in the previous call.

Macron’s reform has been a turning point in the history of pensions in France, since the retirement age had not experienced any increase since 2010, when he was president Nicolas Sarkozy.

History of pensions

In the early 1980s, the minimum retirement age in France was 60 years. It was a measure established by the former socialist president François Mitterrand that remained more or less stable until the 1990s. It was then that there were several attempts to reform the pension system that have always brought government clashes with unions.

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The first reform took place in 1993 under the government of the socialist Mitterrand. His prime minister, Édouard Balladur, increased the number of working years from 37.5 to 40 years in order to achieve a full pension in the private sector. In 1995 the minister Alain Juppé wanted to impose the 40 years of private sector contribution in the public sector. That motivated the unions to protest and paralyze the train and subway services for almost a month.

Between 2007 and 2010, with Sarkozy in power, the government wanted to eliminate some pension plans for certain public workers. The president also approved the law to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62 years. Since then the retirement years have not increased again, but the system has continued to be reformed.

[La crisis de Francia en seis mitos y un número: de la popularidad de Macron al artículo 49.3]

In 2014, the government of François Hollande increased the years of contribution to obtain the full pension, setting it at 43 years in 2035. Then the famous train strike of 2019 took place, the longest in the history of the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF) railways. , which gave rise to the idea of ​​increasing the retirement age to 64 years.

French and Spanish pensions

There are 10 countries with the latest retirement age in Europe: the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain, according to the Finnish Pension Center. France, if it were not for Macron’s reform, would rank alongside Slovakia and Sweden as the European Union country with the earliest retirement age.

Another difference is the years listed. In Spain, you currently need to have contributed for 37 years and nine months to collect the full pension, while in the neighboring country you need 43 years of contributions.

[El principal líder sindical francés pone a España de ejemplo para acabar con la crisis: “Es un modelo”]

Pensions in the State, on the other hand, are updated each year according to the evolution of the CPI. He Government of Pedro Sánchez has decided to raise them by 8.5%, when before the increase was limited. Something for which France has not had to fight, since the increase in pensions according to the evolution of the CPI was something that was approved years ago. In addition, President Macron does not intend to change this section.

The years of contribution of a worker who will take Social Security into account when calculating the amount of his pension is another section modified by the Minister of Inclusion, José Luis Escrivá. The last years of work are usually the ones that are charged the most, since they accumulate more seniority. Escrivá proposed increasing this computation period so that the worker can choose between the last 25 or 29 years listed. France coincides with Spain in this regard, since the last 25 years of contributions are also counted in the private sector.

The latest coincidence is that the Government seeks to increase taxes on companies and a little on workers to save for pensions. . With the entry into force of the Intergenerational Equity Mechanism, a worker with a salary of 2,000 euros gross per month contributes 20 euros more than his salary. While the cost of the company is higher. In fact, Spain ranks as the third country in which the contributions of companies to Social Security have risen the most in the last ten years with 1.6 points of GDP. In addition, it is the third country in the European Union where companies pay more social contributions than GDP. The percentage of Spain and France is 10%.

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