PARIS (MNI) – French Labor Minister Eric Woerth on Monday defended
the government’s plan to raise the retirement age in France to 62,
though he said that 1 in 7 French workers would still have the right to
retire at 60 either because their jobs are a physical hardship or
because they started work at an early age.
The proposed reform of France’s retirement system is “reasonable,
just, progressive and efficient,” Woerth said in an interview with
French daily Le Figaro.
He noted that in addition to raising the age of retirement to 62,
the plan had two other “salient points”: taking the physical hardship of
certain workers into account “for the first time in France,” and a
reconciliation between the private and public sector pension systems.
“To increase to 62 years the legal age of retirement is to pick a
reasonable age, drawing the consequences from the fact that we are now
living longer,” Woerth said.
He argued that simply increasing the number of years people must
pay into the system would have been “unreasonable,” since that number
would have needed to be raised to 47 years in order to put the pension
system in financial balance. Under the government’s proposal, Woerth
said, the system would be in balance by 2018 — the year the legal age
of 62 becomes fully operational — and would remain so until 2020, at
which point “we’ll need to talk about it again, which is normal.”
After 2018, he said, 100,000 out of every 700,000 retiring workers
would still retain the right to retire at 60 with full pension, either
because of physical hardship or because they’d already had “long
careers.” In setting the hardship conditions for retirement at 60, the
government plans to target workers deemed to have lost at least 20% of
their capacity to work. Asked whether that threshold might be lowered,
Woerth suggested it would not be, saying it was “realistic.”
The government is facing a general strike and mass protests against
the pension reform plan on September 7, the day that debate on the bill
begins in the National Assembly. Woerth said he fully expects to be
targeted by the protesters.
“I expect that there will be banners carrying my name or my
effigy,” he said, “since the opposition is using my name to caricaturize
the debate on retirement.”
Woerth, who is embroiled in a scandal over alleged conflicts of
interest when he was Budget Minister regarding a tax investigation of
L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, lauded the labor unions for
refraining from manipulating it for political gain.
And he lambasted the opposition Socialist Party for doing just the
opposite. Noting that the scandal has relegated an in-depth debate over
pension reform to secondary status, he added: “I believe that is the
result of the Socialist Party’s desire to do everything in order to
avoid talking about a subject that divides it: retirement.”
Woerth defended himself against the allegations swirling around the
Bettencourt case, in which it has been suggested that he used his
political influence to get his wife a job as a financial adviser to
Bettencourt at a time when the L’Oreal heiress was the target of an
investigation by the fiscal police. He said he wasn’t worried about
recent press reports that he may be asked to appear in a French court.
“I am very serene,” Woerth said. “I have nothing to be reproached
for in this affair, I am not guilty of any conflict of interest, and I
already had the occasion to explain myself in detail on each of the
accusations of which I am the object.”
Asked whether he expected to keep his job once the pension reform
is out of the way, or during a cabinet shakeup that is expected
afterwards, Woerth replied: “I will do what the President of the
Republic wants me to do. But I feel good in this ministry, where I still
have many projects to take on.”
–Paris newsroom, +331-42-71-55-40; bwolfson@marketnews.com
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