France Tales

Each week brings lots of new things including strikes. Now I am not against strikes in principle, but I am against strikes that make little sense.

Tomorrow there will be a strike in France. There are all kinds of rules about who goes on strike. For example some students will be on strike tomorrow but some will not. My students will be in class but other teacher’s aren’t sure of the strike status. The post office won’t be open but many banks will. Mostly it will resemble a normal day, except if you have something urgent to be done, then I’m sure they will be on strike. Don’t tell anyone what your plans are for tomorrow, keep it a secret, and then you might not be affected.

Seriously though, it reminds me of the book “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky. I never knew that being so political had so many caveats. How does one keep them straight. Okay, back to the strike. If I understand, what is at issue is retirement.

Currently in France you must work for 40 years and then you qualify for retirement, a decent retirement package much better than the average retirement in the states. For most people that averages out to retiring around 60. Well the state is running a huge deficit and people are living longer. Both of those things combined make it hard to continue the current method.

It has been proposed that the French have to work 41 years to qualify for retirement. Well this rallied people in 130 cities and towns tomorrow to go on strike. Now I am no economist but it seems easy to understand that since people live longer and longer that they are a strain on the social security system for a longer period of time. Working an extra year seems like a small price to pay. I’m sure there is waste that can be eliminated in the government and jobs can be shed and efficiencies enacted, but why not also 1 extra year?

I have been reading about it and my French is not perfect but I have not heard a plan by those who oppose the measure. Okay, so you don’t want to add 1 more year to the number of years needed to be worked to retire, then what do you propose instead? Either way you are going to have to do something unpopular. If you get rid of a bunch of jobs then you will have to support those people through unemployment anyway, and if they are over 50, you will probably have to support many of them until they retire, 10 years or more. We heard on the news last night that the average unemployment rate for the over 50 group was 39%. People talk all the time about how difficult it is to find a job here in France if you are over 45 years old.

I hope I am missing something and one of you can point it out. It seems like reality is being denied.

Here is an article I found on Expatica in English about the strikes. It doesn’t really get into any of the nitty gritty issues but here it is.