December 2022
06Dec

French unions vow to fight pension reform, with ‘mobilisation beginning in January’

France's eight biggest unions have issued a joint statement promising massive, co-ordinated strikes and demonstrations in January if the government goes ahead with planned pension reforms. “We will decide on a first date of a united mobilisation with strikes and demonstrations in January, if the government remains stubborn on its pension reform project,” reads the statement issued on Monday by the eight largest and most influential unions – CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC, CFTC, Unsa, Solidaires and FSU. All eight are...

December 6, 2022
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October 2022
27Oct

France’s Macron vows to implement contested pension changes

French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to implement contested pension reforms that would make younger generations work longer. In an interview Wednesday evening on France 2 television, Macron said the changes would start being applied next year. “There’s only one way to do it if we are lucid. Since we are living longer, it’s to work longer,” he said. Read also US. Early retirement took off during the pandemic The minimum retirement age to get full a pension would be gradually increased from 62...

October 27, 2022
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September 2022
30Sep

Macron faces strike as French unions flex muscles

A nationwide strike on Thursday disrupted the French energy sector, taking a large chunk of the nuclear production offline, as workers push for a pay hike amid rising tensions between unions and the government over a planned pensions reform. "Thousands of workers are on strike today," said Philippe Martinez, chief of the hard-left CGT union as he attended a protest march in Paris along with several thousand people, many of them waving red labour union flags. "This is a message to...

September 30, 2022
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26Sep

French PM warns retirement reform may be forced through parliament without vote

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne says a decision will be taken later this week on the parliamentary method to be used to advance contested government plans to reform retirement and pension legislation. Borne does not exclude the use of the constitutional clause known as 49.3, which allows the adoption of legislation without a vote in the National Assembly. What is certain is that the reform will be discussed at Monday's cabinet meeting. The government knows that the parliamentary debate on the divisive...

September 26, 2022
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19Sep

France’s far right to oppose Macron’s pension reform, Le Pen warns

French far-right Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen said on Sunday that her party will vote against President Emmanuel Macron's pension reforms and against the 2023 budget. "We will oppose Emmanuel Macron's pension reform plans that are unfair and will divide (the country)," Le Pen told a party meeting in Cap d'Agde in southern France. Macron wants to start implementing the reforms, which mainly consist of a progressive rise to 65 of the legal retirement age, next summer. France's far right scored...

September 19, 2022
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14Sep

Choice Overload? Participation and Asset Allocation in French Employer-Sponsored Saving Plans

By Marie Briere, James M. Poterba & Ariane Szafarz This paper employs administrative data from one of the largest plan providers in France to investigate the role of plan and default characteristics in affecting whether employees participate in the plan and whether they accept its default investment option. The dataset includes information on the saving choices of 680,392 active employees at 1,610 firms. French employers have wide discretion in structuring employee saving plans. All plans must offer medium-term investments, which...

September 14, 2022
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13Sep

French retirement spending threatens deficit targets, pension panel says

France's public spending on pensions as currently planned threatens President Emmanuel Macron's deficit-reduction targets, an independent retirement system panel said in a report to be released later this week. Macron's government aims to reduce the public sector budget deficit to below a European Union ceiling of 3% of economic output in 2027 from 5% this year. To reach that target, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire aims to keep annual real public spending growth over the period to 0.6% on average, which...

September 13, 2022
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09Sep

France’s biggest union warns Macron: Reforming pensions now would ‘set France on fire’

France’s biggest union has warned President Emmanuel Macron that reforming pensions at a time of high inflation and economic woes would “set France on fire.” In an interview with RTL radio on Thursday, Laurent Berger, the president of the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT), said the French people “are in a very tense moment, with a lot of anxiety.” “I tell the government and will also tell the president: To start pushing back the legal retirement age in a vertical...

September 9, 2022
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June 2022
08Jun

France no longer sees raising retirement age to 65 as ‘a priority’

Pension reform, a key pledge from President Emmanuel Macron’s presidential election campaign, is no longer a major priority for the government, new Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has said. Mr Macron had said multiple times that he planned to raise the pension age in France from 62 to 65 years, and said that the move would be one of the only ways to tackle the pension deficit. However, new PM Ms Borne has now said that it is no longer seen as...

June 8, 2022
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May 2022
27May

French pensions to be tied to inflation in July, labour minister says

French pensions are to be tied to inflation from this summer in an effort to increase retirees spending power, France’s labour minister Olivier Dussopt has said. “What we want is for this inflation indexation to be valid from July,” he told RTL on Tuesday (May 24). Inflation in France reached 4.8% year-on-year in April, and could rise to 5.4% in June, the national statistics bureau Insee states. “If we take into account an inflation of 4%, for example, for a pension of...

May 27, 2022
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