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French Unions Call Strikes on Sept. 23 as Sarkozy Holds Firm on Pensions
French unions called for a day of strikes on Sept. 23 following yesterday’s demonstrations to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age.
Sarkozy earlier today vowed not to budge on increasing the retirement age to 62 from 60, the main plank of a proposed pension overhaul. He agreed to allow some in physically demanding jobs to retire early.
“A large part of the population has already accepted that Sarkozy won’t withdraw the pensions reform,” Frederic Dabi, a director at the Paris-based Ifop polling institute, said in a telephone interview. “Now we will have to see how people react to the minor changes he conceded.”
The date of the next “day of action” comes after the planned Sept. 15 vote on the bill in the National Assembly and the start of debate in the Senate.
The state pension fund will lose 10.7 billion euros ($13.6 billion) this year, with the shortfall reaching 50 billion euros in 2020 without a change in policy, according to the Budget Ministry. Unions and the opposition Socialist Party want to keep the retirement age at 60, and plug losses through higher taxes on capital and on high earners.
Protests across France yesterday drew between 1.1 million and 2.7 million people, according to police and unions, making the demonstrations among the biggest in the past two decades.
“The large turnout shows the determination of workers to impose a different reform, one that shows more fairness and solidarity,” said a joint statement issued by six unions after a meeting today.
Pension Amendments
The amendments to the pension bill were presented to parliament today by Labor Minister Eric Woerth, government spokesman Luc Chatel told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.
The main change is that workers need to demonstrate a 10 percent level of incapacity, to be determined by a medical board, to benefit from early retirement, compared with 20 percent in the original bill. The change will triple the number of beneficiaries to 30,000, Sarkozy’s office said. About 700,000 people retire every year in France.
Sarkozy also called on companies to study ways to put people with physical jobs on part-time work or in training positions at the end of their careers. He also said he’d create a group of experts to study the effect of so-called hardship jobs.
Opposition to tighter pension rules sparked extended strikes in 2003 and 2007. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac dropped an attempt to eliminate retirement privileges for transport workers after walkouts crippled the country.
France’s legal retirement age has been 60 since Socialist President Francois Mitterrand cut it from 65 after his 1981 election. Germany decided in 2007 to raise its retirement age gradually to 67 from 65. Spain and Italy have also increased their retirement ages to 65 to address the squeeze of longer life expectancies and declining birth rates.
To contact the reporters on this story: Helene Fouquet in Paris at hfouquet1@bloomberg.net; Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net
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