Macron starts pension rollback despite protests
Ramin Mazaheri
Press TV, Paris
After being forced to delay because of the Yellow Vest anti-austerity movement, French President Emmanuel Macron has begun his right-wing pension reform which is already certain to provoke major protests this month.
Macron is pushing for a one-size-fits-all, universal system, to force workers to pay more and for employers to pay less, and to effectively raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 years old for many workers.
Every major union except one is opposed to the major change, and a poll this week showed nearly 70% of France has 'no confidence' in Macron’s reform. However, Macron has repeatedly ignored public opinion and even bypassed Parliament to force through neoliberal reforms by executive order.
Many say a universal pension system favors the highly educated and is inherently unjust to manual laborers. For example, how can a railway worker who has straightened train tracks in all types of weather since the age of 18 be compared with someone with an upper-level university degree who didn’t start their air-conditioned office job until the age of 26?
As has been the case since 2010, France’s government says the reforms are necessary for investor confidence and that they will eventually bear fruit.
France and the entire Eurozone has already endured a lost decade of economic growth, as their economies remained burdened by debt and compound interest in order to pay off the failures by corporate bankers in the previous decade.
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