More than 1 million protest in France

March 7, 2023 12:22 PM

From Le Monde in English: An estimated 1.28 million took to the streets across France on Tuesday, March 7, against French President Emmanuel Macron's plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030 while strikes disrupted transport and schools. The figure suggests the demonstrations were some of the biggest in decades, slightly higher than the 1.27 million estimated during a previous round of protests against the reform on January 31 which had seen record numbers since the beginning of the protest movement.

For the sixth day of action against the reform, unions had said they wanted to bring France to a standstill. The mobilization in the streets was very strong, Laurent Berger, the secretary general of the moderate union CFDT said, describing it as "historic compared to the last 40 or 50 years."

... Most people support the strikers, polls show. Ali Toure, a 28-year-old construction worker, was waiting for a delayed train north of Paris on Tuesday morning but said it was "no big deal" if he arrived late to work for a month. "They're right to be striking. Manual labor is hard," he said.
A blockade of oil refineries, underway since Tuesday morning, has the potential to cause severe disruption if it continues in the weeks ahead.

From another Le Monde article from March 7: "We mustn't give up, it's possible to make the government withdraw on 64 years," Berger told broadcaster LCI earlier in the day. "I call on all the country's employees, citizens and retirees who are against the pensions reform to come out and protest en masse," Berger told France Inter radio. "The president cannot remain deaf" to the protests, he added.

posted by Bella Donna (28 comments total)

I love the French, they don't give an inch. I wish US voters had their political will and level of participation in protesting
posted by doctor_negative at 12:35 PM on March 7, 2023 [37 favorites]

You and me both, doctor negative. I was watching coverage on Swedish TV tonight and it is just so impressive. One middle-aged guy protesting said he was there for his daughter. She teaches special needs children and he said the work was exhausting and it was too much to ask her and people like her to work harder. I truly respect these people who are willing to fight to not only keep the benefits they have but also protect their children and younger generations.

I was a little sad that we can't yet muster that many people to protest air pollution, fossil fuel companies, yadda yadda climate-related stuff. Maybe someday. In the meantime, I hope the unions kick ass and win this fight, I truly do.
posted by Bella Donna at 1:08 PM on March 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

I don't know much about the French retirement system, so don't know whether raising the retirement age is a good or bad idea, compared to other options to balance system finances.

I do know about retirement systems in general, so will note that:

1) France's system, like most modern government retirement systems, is a "pay-as-you-go" system. That is, payments to pensioners (mostly the elderly) are not funded from their past savings, but from current taxes on workers (and employers, but most of that effectively comes out of workers' pay).

2) In France, as in most rich countries, the number of pensioners is growing faster than the number of workers because of demographic trends (lower birth rates and longer lives). Fewer workers per pensioner means you have to either raise tax rates or cut benefits in some way.

3) Raising the retirement age cuts benefits by reducing the number of years of retirement; alternatively, you could cut the average benefit per year. Benefit cuts could be applied to everyone or targeted toward the richer, for example by income level or type of work. France's pensions are relatively generous by international standards, with benefits replacing 74 percent of earnings - which of course doesn't mean that cutting benefits is a good idea.

4) Taxes could be raised. Increasing the payroll tax rate would be a larger burden for poorer workers. Additional taxes could be targeted on the rich, but France is already a very high-tax country, with a tax system that is ranked the least "competitive" in the OECD. Again, that doesn't mean that raising taxes further is necessarily a bad idea.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:36 PM on March 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

It's definitely great to see so many people publicly voicing their disagreement with proposed government action, rather than just bitching to their mates in the pub about it. But governments all over the place are and will continue to struggle with how to fund retirements because of the ageing population. I wish I knew the answer, but raising the retirement age seems like one of the lesser evils, compared with the primarily alternatives of raising taxes or reducing benefits. Of course, raising taxes on only the rich and/or companies that make mega-profits could solve the problem, but what government is ever going to raise the taxes on those who own them?
posted by dg at 1:53 PM on March 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

My son was supposed to be in Paris on a college trip this week, but didn't go. I asked a friend who lives in Paris about whether the strikes would impact his classmates who did go, but she felt it wouldn't be a problem at all.

Then she sent me a picture of herself with her union's flag, from last month's strikes when she marched.

Bless her heart, I love that lady. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 2:22 PM on March 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

USA raised the full-SSA retirement age from 65 to 67 but phased it in so slowly nobody complained (only people under 40 in 1983 were affected, and the phase-in was graduated over people age 23-40 so only the late boomers got hit with the full 2 year change).
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:24 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm very much in 2 minds here, good on for the French for fighting back for their rights .... but modern medicine is allowing people to live longer, it's not unreasonable to slowly raise retirement age .... but given the realities of such things one really ought to get 20 years notice of such a thing (which may be unrealistic in a political world).

While I think we should be slowly raising the retirement age, I also don't think we should be doing it to pay for the baby-boomer's retirement, honestly they (and that includes me) should have thought ahead and should have had govt saving for their demographic bulge while they were still paying taxes
posted by mbo at 2:46 PM on March 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's true "pay-as-you-go" retirement faces demographic challenges. We humans invented money, but there are real things that actually exist, like fossil fuels, solar panels, crops, medicines, and actual hours worked by real people in this case.

We could always increase payroll taxes on non-essential jobs, like oh advertising, legal, etc, but leave the primary and secondary sectors alone. If we've fewer people doing bullshit jobs, then we've more work hours to care for the elderly, or even do agriculture research so that maybe more of us survive climate change.

Anyways, there are two major moral objections against raising the retirement age here:

At least some people wind up physically damaged by their jobs, like say a hospital orderly who spends their life picking up heavy old people, so expending their working years seriously harms them. Ideally you'd force them into another job in their mid 30s, but that ship sailed.

There are no jobs in France for people anywhere near retirement age, so work disruption later in life force people into early retirement, which then lowers their lifetime benefits dramatically. It's more fair to just cut benefits across the board, but invariably this gives even more to the financial class from which Macron hails.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:20 PM on March 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Given that you need to increase taxes or cut benefits to balance the pension, it's not clear that increasing retirement age by 2 years is that bad an option. Main drawback is that it is fairly likely to be the thin end of the wedge.

For those that follow French politics, is Macron likely to hold out against the protests?
posted by plonkee at 3:33 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here in NZ our current (vaguely leftie) we fund our retirement "pay as you go", but recognising the impending crunch that the retiring baby-boomers represented about 15 years ago the govt started an investment fund to help pay for it (effectively getting us boomers to partly fund our retirements) - sadly when we've elected their (vaguely right, still to the left of the Dems) competitors they've stopped contributing to that fund so it's nowhere as large as one would have hoped
posted by mbo at 3:58 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

We face challenges as the population ages. We should keep our promises to people who’ve contributed to the system while not screwing over the younger generations. It’s not really possible unless we make having children less onerous and/or ease immigration restrictions. (Or find ways to have productivity increases benefit the population broadly and not just the 1%!) There are systemic issues here beyond demographics.

As an American I’m not in a position to cast shade on another country’s immigration politics and as a Francophile I’m reluctant to dump on France. But the fact that there are vast refugee camps in Calais full of people trying to get to the UK (of all places!) speaks volumes about France’s attitude toward immigrants.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:29 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

>should have had govt saving for their demographic bulge while they were still paying taxes

we did! We have $2.8T sitting in the "social security trust fund":

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html

Most* of this balance wasn't conjured out of thin air, it represents the collective over-contributions of the FICA tax by all workers 1986 - 2017 or so.

Al Gore's "Lockbox" talk of 2000 was about not ballooning the deficit so that SSA would not have to compete with other treasury sellers around now, but the country had other fiscal priorities 2001-2008 alas.

SSA is fine for another 10-15 years**, after that things might get tight unless we start tweaking things again now.

* the periodic interest credited to the SSTF on its immense holdings, and the FICA tax holiday stimulus during 2011-12 is/was paid by just printing new treasury obligations...

** right when I plan on starting collecting, natch
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:19 PM on March 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Given that you need to increase taxes or cut benefits to balance the pension

Or increase immigration. Every time I have to listen to anti-immigrant bigots here, I think about the fact that as I age, I want there to be enough younger people to keep things running.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:35 PM on March 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

USA raised the full-SSA retirement age from 65 to 67

Yes, but that's mathematically equivalent to a benefit cut. The early eligibility age remains 62. That is, you can claim benefits at any age from 62 to 70. It sounds like the proposal in France is to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:21 PM on March 7, 2023

Yes that would have been me, I lived in the US for 20 years, paid into SS at the max rate and will never be allowed to claim any of it back .......

When I die my (American) spouse can claim it all, I jut have to watch my back in the mean time ....

(to be fair if I could claim it it would all go to the NZ govt to back my NZ retirement pension which would be perfectly OK)
posted by mbo at 7:55 PM on March 7, 2023

I don't know much about the French retirement system, so don't know whether raising the retirement age is a good or bad idea, compared to other options to balance system finances.

Well, fundamentally there's the problem of rapidly changing dependency ratios i.e. the ratio between people who pay tax and people who are retired and have that retirement paid for from tax revenue. That has to be solved one way or another. Many countries are facing declining populations and it's mathematically certain that the faster your population declines, the more extreme that ratio change will be. Of course if your population eventually stabilises then so does the ratio but that eventually might be after 2100 which isn't much help in funding next year's pension payments.

France actually has a less rapidly ageing population than almost anywhere in Europe which is why they've been able to put this off for so long. We are now seeing a preview in Europe of the deep, deep demographic weirdness that is coming when China hits peak labour force (which will be very soon) and what that does to their economy - we just don't know because nobody has seen this kind of demographic shift before.

You can adjust the funding level of a scheme through:

One, reduce the level of retirement benefits

Two, reduce the length of time you get them (and increase the time you pay in) by increasing retirement age

Three, increase the amount you pay in during your working life

Four, inject money into the system from a source that isn't PAYG payroll taxes such as wealth taxes or income taxes

People don't want option One either because they're counting on that money in order to live the retired lives they want.

Three is hard to stomach from an intergenerational equity point of view.

Four seems like the easy way out but the reality is that most tax revenue is raised from VAT, income tax, and social security taxes and that other taxes would have to go way, way up in order to pay for something like this. Not saying that isn't the right way to go but it's not a matter of just bumping corporation tax by a point or two.

4) Taxes could be raised. Increasing the payroll tax rate would be a larger burden for poorer workers. Additional taxes could be targeted on the rich, but France is already a very high-tax country, with a tax system that is ranked the least "competitive" in the OECD. Again, that doesn't mean that raising taxes further is necessarily a bad idea.

The criticism generally, and I am not a tax expert so this may not be right, is that France is a relatively good place to be wealthy but a very expensive place to get wealthy. In other words, wealth is not taxed so much but income is. That means it's generally quite hard to increase social security / income taxes more because they are already high.

This has to be seen alongside the retirement system though. Someone on 45k euros in France pays an average tax rate of 41.2% vs 24.8% in the UK but French government pensions are the main source of retirement income for French people - in other words that higher tax rate pays for a fully comprehensive pension in France vs a small state pension in the UK which you need to supplement by additional pre-tax retirement savings. Once you adjust for that, French income taxes are high but not ridiculously so.

However this also means that the state pension age is the only relevant retirement age for almost everyone - there is no equivalent of taking early retirement and waiting a few years to trigger payment of your state pension the way there is in the UK or US. I think that has blunted and diffused the anger that would have been felt in those countries since many of the critical people striking here (power plant operators, train drivers, etc) have occupational pensions in addition to their state pensions in the UK and US and actually can still retire a few years before the "official" age.

That's not going to happen in France because retirement is completely centralised - if the state says retirement age goes up, that is immediately and definitely true for everyone covered by the scheme, not just for the least fortunate who have not alternative retirement savings.

We could always increase payroll taxes on non-essential jobs, like oh advertising, legal, etc, but leave the primary and secondary sectors alone. If we've fewer people doing bullshit jobs, then we've more work hours to care for the elderly, or even do agriculture research so that maybe more of us survive climate change.

1) I really don't think this is a correct understanding of Graeber's thesis around Bullshit Jobs. They are not jobs that you, or the government, decide don't have social value. A Bullshit Job is an inherently subjective phenomenon because the person doing it has to feel, even if that feeling is deeply submerged, that the job is pointless. Many advertising people like their jobs, even deep down. Yeah, I don't get it either, but I do think that disqualifies them as Bullshit Jobs. It's pretty clear from his original essay that he views Bullshit Jobs as a labour dignity issue as much as a productivity problem.

2) Separately, I also disagree with the thesis because unlike Graeber I'm not an anarchist. Many of his categories of Bullshit Jobs (as laid out in the book rather than the essay) are what I would regard as societal facilitation and lubrication and are roles that are by no means specific to capitalism. My job, which in one sense is very much a product of capitalism, in another sense absolutely existed in the USSR - the equivalent job would have been at Gosplan or as middle management in a regional planning department. Again, to Graeber there was not much to recommend a state capitalist system to a mixed capitalist system like the French but I do want to short circuit the argument that these jobs are purely an artefact of capitalism. (Especially "late stage" [lol] capitalism). I know he wrote a whole book seeking to find examples of societies which do not follow the conventional narrative but it's still true that all the really large societies we know about seem to have an awful lots of people filling priest-like or or lawyer-like or diplomat-like roles which seem zero-sum but may be also be our only alternative to warlordism.

3) This proposal doesn't work because like all sin-taxes, if successful it destroys its own tax base, a special tax on income from advertising means many fewer people working in advertising which no doubt you and much missed Graeber would laud but it doesn't solve the fiscal imbalance because it rapidly depletes its source. We can do this with tobacco because first we genuinely do want to destroy demand and second addiction creates very inelastic demand which can partially withstand massively punitive taxes.

4) It isn't a serious proposal as an incremental change to France's current economic system - if you want to propose a system where the state centrally decides what work everyone has to do, then sure within that radical proposal you could surely find time to deal with a retirement resourcing problem but then that *is* what you'd have to propose if you really think we can centrally decide what kind of jobs are BS.

4b) Reflecting on the previous point a bit more, a socialist society would face essentially the same basic problem. Of course it would have access to its full collective resources (they wouldn't be tied up in the yachts of the ultra wealthy) but the fundamental problem of supporting a growing number of non-workers from a shrinking number of workers would still exist.
posted by atrazine at 2:15 AM on March 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

I’ve long maintained what I call the “roast beef” theory of retirement. Of course I want to be able to eat roast beef when I’m too old to be productive but I can’t just bury it in my backyard until I need it. One way or another the needs of the elderly will have to come on the backs of the young, presumably, but not necessarily, from their surplus productivity.

Any system of saving (“lockbox” lol) is simply a gimmick to justify commandeering future generations’ output. Things like investing in the housing, nutrition, and education of the young, creating good opportunities for young workers and parents, etc. are sound ways to “save” because they increase the probability of having roast beef to spare in the future and seem to justify mandating that it be shared. Most other “savings” assets are illusory and subject to massive devaluation when an entire generation tries to liquidate it simultaneously. Or, worse, the young could simply repudiate their “debt” to the old just as the old have repudiated their duty to the young.

There will be no roast beef unless there is a just and equitable resolution to the question of who owes what to whom.
posted by sjswitzer at 3:50 AM on March 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Here's the thing: we live in a society with billionaires. And I'm using we to include basically the entire "West".

A society with billionaires can afford retirement at a reasonable age, a high standard of living, univeral health care, and all the other things we want. If it couldn't then billionaires wouldn't exist.

Therefore the "problem" of funding those things is illusory. Billionaires exist so the money for those things exists.

The only real problem is extracting the money for a decent society from the billionaires.

And that's a not my circus, not my monkeys kind of problem. That's what you are there to do Marcon. How you do it is up to you and tbh I really don't give a shit about the specifics.

Money exists to do the needful, fucking do the needful.

All the armchair economics talking about the difficulty and complexity of the situation is, however inadvertently and unintentionally, accepting the billionaire framing that the budgeting must be done without taking any money from billionaires.

Billionaires exist. Therefore the money exists. That's the only fact that actually, ultimately, matters.

Any discussion of the question outside of that fact is irrelevant.
posted by sotonohito at 6:27 AM on March 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

I meant to add, on the side issue of the American Social Security system, there is also only one relevant fact: only the first $160,200/year a person earns is subject to Social Security taxes. Doubling that would secure the economic future of Social Security for a century.

Therefore it's the same as France's problem. We just need to extract the money from the rich.

There is no dire economic shortfall. The money exists, it requires only that the government serve us rather than the billionaires to use that money and solve the problem.
posted by sotonohito at 6:31 AM on March 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Doubling that would secure the economic future of Social Security for a century.

No. According to the Social Security analysis, even taxing ALL earnings would extend solvency not by a century, but by a little over 30 years to 2067.

That policy is almost certainly going to be part of any reform package, but it's not sufficient by itself.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:58 AM on March 8, 2023

The only real problem is extracting the money for a decent society from the billionaires.

"Confiscating US billionaires’ wealth would run the US government about 8 months"

Not even that, really, since you would not be confiscating a Scrooge McDuck vault, you would be confiscating shares of Tesla, which would collapse in value as soon as word got out. Ditto the Bezos yacht. And you would of course alienate any number of would be entrepreneurs who have options when deciding where to start up their mega-dreams.

Money is fluid, value is not static.
posted by BWA at 7:12 AM on March 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

"It's impossible to confiscate billionaire's wealth" is a straw man that serves the monied class. Since the 1980s productivity and wealth inequality have increased in lockstep. The average worker is no better off, in many cases the poor are worse off, and those at the top of the ladder, especially on it's very highest rung, have seen their riches multiply exponentially. It is undeniable that there is a distribution problem (unless you don't believe that the human suffering it creates is a problem). There are solutions in the existing framework to redistribute wealth, to name a few: progressive tax rates, taxes on wealth, antitrust suits, actually enforcing existing legislation, cracking down on white collar crime, creating stronger unions and giving workers more rights. Extracting wealth from the billionaire class is not difficult (wealth is all they have!). Finding the political will to take money and power from the already rich and powerful is the problem.
posted by Ned G at 7:53 AM on March 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Well, yeah, that was my fourth point. At the moment we fund labour's retirement from labour's share of the national income. Sitting on top of that is the unfairly low share of labour's share of that income.

So if the returns to labour go up (at the expense of returns to capital) then the problem still exists - but the size of pie for labour to carve up between labour's present consumption and labour's deferred consumption is bigger.

(when returns to capital drop enough, billionaires disappear since they're basically just a product of high capital returns)

It is perhaps more accurate to say that what we confiscate is (potentially just through reducing the returns to capital) is the consumption of billionaires. Yes, obviously just taking ten billion of capital which wasn't being consumed and not consuming is elsewhere is meaningless but billionaires also consume a lot more and that consumption (unlike the numbers in a spreadheet of wealth inequality) are actual allocation of resources going to one group disproportionately.
posted by atrazine at 8:10 AM on March 8, 2023

"It's impossible to confiscate billionaire's wealth" is a straw man

I am totally in favor of more a far more progressive tax system, especially on billionaires. But 1) There is a point (well above the current level, but it exists) where increasing tax rates would start to deter productive economic activity, and 2) billionaires' income is only a fraction of total income. Even Biden's $400,000 cut-off exempts 3/4 of the tax base.

You can favor tax increases on billionaires and also acknowledge that we can't, metaphorically speaking, simply take one of Jeff Bezos' mansions and use it to house millions of people.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:46 AM on March 8, 2023

Financial Transaction Tax.

Buy or sell a security? Taxed. Doesn't have to be much. Just a 1% tax, rounded to the nearest cent, would be enough to fund quite a bit of stuff.
posted by SansPoint at 11:53 AM on March 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Just a reminder that this is about France. Please stop centering the US.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 2:14 PM on March 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

For those of you still following this - Macron has just used his Presidential executive power to push the law through without a vote in the French lower house. Likely to be quite a spicy reaction to that on the streets.
posted by atrazine at 9:01 AM on March 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm sure in the next election, when LePen or whichever Fascist candidate wins, Marcon and the other liberals will assume it was due to the nefarious left not clapping loudly enough and have NOTHING AT ALL to do with dictatorially ramming through a universally hated plan that condemns people to work longe and get less for their labor.
posted by sotonohito at 6:49 AM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]