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Sarkozy Draws Battle Lines
France's President has laid out the next stages of his controversial reforms program, this time taking aim at the hundred of thousands of state employees who retire earlier than almost any other Europeans.
Trade union leaders have vowed to plunge France into chaos in order to protect their members' right to retire at 55 - some railway workers can even leave work on a full salary as young as 50. Sarkozy says this is inadmissable: But how does he plan to bring the public sector in line?
Speaking to an association of journalists specialising in social issues at France's Senate today, Sarkozy gave an outline for his plans to shake up France's creaking social model. France needs nothing less than a new worker's contract, he explained, "profoundly renewed and profoundly different."
He explained that the current system was no longer financially tenable.
The first and most controversial measure touches on retirement. He wants to raise France's retirement age to 65, bringing it in line with the much of the rest of Europe. It is currently 60, though special regimes are granted for state workers in public transport, the state-owned gas and electricity giants, Bank of France workers, some legal clerks and - weirdly - employees of the Paris Opera and the Comédie Française. They retire at 55 while train drivers, thanks to a law dating back to the age of steam, can retire at 50.
Pensions are substantially higher than those for private sector workers.
Even Sarkozy seems unwilling to charge blindly into these workers' cushy fortresses. Not only are they France's most cossetted workers, they are also its most heavily unionised and strike-prone. Transport strikes which bring the country to a grinding halt have become a regular feature of previous attempts to reform the French system.
This time, Sarkozy hopes to bring about change by hitting early retirers (what the French call pre-retraites) in their wallets. He said that they would be taxed more heavily than those who retire after 65. He said that everyone should be a contributor for forty years.
Sarkozy also said he would ask the government to reform the financial and legal system, which he says penalises those who continue to work and dissuades firms from hiring older staff.
As part of his proposals to make France work harder, the President pledged to ease the 35 hour week, with a more important role for businesses in determining working hours and contracts: This, he says, will bring France in line with other nations. He added that the government would simplify the "code du travail" (workplace law), which is one of the world's most complex. Workers would be given more choice between salaries and holidays. Sarkozy previously promised that workers who worked more than 35 hours per week would enjoy tax-free salaries for the extra hours worked.
He also pledged changes to France's unemployment benefits system, merging the benefits office and the jobseeker's agency and promising tougher action against unemployed citizens who refuse two decent job offers.
The reform of pensions comes as France searches for ways to protect its social model while fulfilling its EU budget obligations. Pensions, in particular, place a heavy burden on the state's coffers, though it is politically unpopular to tinker with them. However, as the head of the employer's federation MEDEF Lawrence Parisot told journalists today, France has little choice. "There were four contributors for every retiree in the 1960s, two in the 1980s," she said, "by 2020, there will be fewer than one worker for every retiree."
Will Sarkozy pull it off? Of course, some unions will oppose any move to trim benefits, and can cause untold chaos to make their point. Bernard Thibault, leader of the hardline Communist CGT which represents thousands of state railway workers has promised "sport - and not just in the rugby stadiums" if Sarkozy pushes ahead with protests. But other union leaders are more fatalistic. The largely pro-Sarkozy Figaro reports on a poll which indicates that almost three quarters of French voters agree with the need for reform. A large majority of those polled also agreed that Sarkozy's proposals were courageous and made financial sense (a slightly smaller majority described them as "just.")
Despite British reports to the contrary, polls this morning show that Sarkozy's popularity is still riding high at 64 percent. However, it is unlikely that the President will ever be as popular again. There was criticism from the overseas press last week that Sarkozy was softening his hard line and was likely to miss what could be his only opportunity to reform France.
Some reforms could be compromised: Like their adversaries in the unions, French governments sometimes factor a bargaining allowance into their proposals or demands. Thus, when the unions arrive for negotiations, they can come away with a string of concessions. Setting the retirement age at 65 seems to be one figure that will come down - most pundits predicted Sarkozy would raise it to just 62.
However, today's message seemed to be that he was pressing ahead.
