At 5.30 p.m., Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne revealed her pension reform plan.
Apart from the legal retirement age, which is now 64, one of the pillars of this bill will be the system for long careers.
According to the executive, there is “urgency” to redress a regime which could post a deficit of around twenty billion euros in 2030. “Letting accumulate” the “deficits would be irresponsible”, estimated Elisabeth Borne, ensuring to propose a "project of justice and a project of social progress".
She also affirmed that this project was in her eyes "better than it was six months ago" before the consultation with the social partners and the political forces.
The system of so-called long careers was one of the government's mantras, already during Macron's first five-year term.
It will therefore be adapted so that "no one who started working early is forced to work over the age of 44", underlined the Prime Minister who praised a "fairer system".
Those who started before the age of 16 can leave from the age of 58, between 16 and 18 from the age of 60, between 18 and 20 from the age of 62.
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This novelty of the bill also hides a concession made to the CFDT: people who worked before the age of 16 can continue to leave at age 58 if they have worked the 43 years now required, plus an additional year and no longer two.
Something new for women
Departures for long careers for women will be facilitated by this reform.
Women who have benefited from parental leave to raise their children will now be able to include up to a maximum of 4 quarters in their calculation.
Disabled people will also be able to leave at the age of 62 at the full rate, disabled workers from the age of 55.
Workers exposed to asbestos will continue to be able to leave from the age of 50.
Employees who have suffered an accident at work will be able to leave, subject to conditions, two years before the legal age.
This postponement to 64 rather than 65 could earn the government the support of Republicans.
The other oppositions and the unions are standing up against any increase in the legal age, believing that it would especially affect the most modest.
The rest is hardly in doubt: meeting at the end of the afternoon at the Bourse du travail in Paris, the leaders of the eight major unions (CFDT, CGT, FO, CFE-CGC, CFTC, Unsa, Solidaires, FSU) should call for a first day of demonstrations and strikes on January 19 or 24.
"If Emmanuel Macron wants to make it his mother of reforms (...), for us it will be the mother of battles", summarizes Frédéric Souillot, boss of Force Ouvrière.
And to conclude this exceptional day on the pension front, Elisabeth Borne will defend her reform this Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. in the France 2 television news.
