By Stephen Sandelius

PARIS (MNI) – France faces another wave of strikes and mass
protests Thursday as opponents to the government’s pension reform make a
last-ditch effort to derail a project that would raise the retirement
age by two years over the coming decade.

The goal of union organizers is to match or exceed the protest on
September 7, which they claim mobilized 2.7 million marchers (1.1
million according to police estimates.)

While union leaders display confidence, they are well aware of the
challenge of demanding that employees forego another day’s pay for a
goal that seems increasingly illusory. The reform bill has already been
adopted by the National Assembly and is likely to be modified only at
the margins in the Senate debate next month.

Despite some minor concessions by the government, public opposition
is growing. Some 57% of the French reject the rise in the minimum
retirement age to 62 years, according to a BVA poll earlier this month.

In view of the trend across Europe to push back retirement as life
expectancy increases, it would be easy to dismiss this opposition as
merely a disinclination to work longer or an attempt to seek a “French
exception” to an apparently inevitable trend.

The growing unpopularity of President Nicolas Sarkozy and
record-high rejection of his economic policies have certainly fanned the
discontent.

At the heart of the wide-ranging debate over alternate ways to
finance the pay-as-you-go pension system in the coming years is a
deep-seated desire to overhaul what many French perceive as an
unequitable distribution of wealth in society.

To demand that fatigued workers sacrifice their later years to pay
for a pension of pittance, while those with seven-digit incomes coast
down in golden parachutes or the super-rich pocket millions in tax
rebates seems unjust to many.

To soften the sting of the hike in the legal retirement age, the
reform bill does foresee exceptions to the 62-year threshold for those
who started work at a very early age or who have raised several children
or have suffered physically at their jobs. A few more concessions of
this sort are being held in reserve by the government as a “response” to
Thursday’s protest.

But another spoonful of sugar will hardly make the bitter medicine
go down. The BVA poll suggests that rejection of the highly symbolic
hike in the minimum retirement age is overshadowed by opposition to a
parallel increase of two years, to 67, in the age at which people can
retire with a full pension regardless of how long they have worked.

If nearly two thirds of the public are opposed to this component of
the reform, it is no doubt because longer years of education and high
unemployment rates among the youth mean that an ever smaller share of
the workforce can hope to rack up the 41 years of contributions that
will be required for a full pension at 62.

Labor Minister Eric Woerth made clear again this week that the
government was not about to budge on the new age limits. The government
fears that doing so would not only undermine hopes of balancing the
pension accounts by 2018 but also jeopardize the government’s
shorter-term strategy for fiscal consolidation and perhaps its
prime-borrower status as well.

“Nicolas Sarkozy is stubbornly attached to the same accounting
logic, obsessed by France’s credit rating on financial markets,” FO
union head Jean-Claude Mailly charged in an interview published
Wednesday.

For the unions, the stakes riding on today’s protest are high. Even
if they doctor their estimates to the upside, a disappointing turnout
would probably signal the slow death of the movement.

But even strong turnout would be no guarantee of victory, since the
unions are divided on the way forward. “If the 23rd [of September] is a
success, we’ll have to organize the follow-up rapidly and especially
discuss the plans of action,” Mailly conceded in the interview.

FO favors further days of strikes — perhaps extendable, depending
on the determination of the rank-and-file, Mailly said. Reformist unions
like the CFDT prefer weekend rallies in order to limit the financial
costs to the protesters, who lose pay by walking off their jobs. The
leading CGT union, torn between its radical and reformist wings, remains
flexible.

The government, with its back to the wall, is counting on the
traditional disunity among the country’s unions to fray the protest
movement and allow its bill to be adopted with few changes, as has been
the case with previous pension reforms.

However, rather than marking the culmination of Sarkozy’s campaign
strategy to modernize French society, the pension reform is likely to
remain a thorn in side of millions of voters, who will be attracted by
the pledge of parties on the Left to rescind the hike of the minimum
retirement age if they are elected to office in 2012.

–Paris newsroom +331 4271 5540; Email: stephen@marketnews.com

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