French retirement protests

make them work till 65 we have to and its supposed to be equal in the EU.

Let me get this right.

Because you have to work until 65 then everyone should have to?

quote:

Originally posted by Bananahead:
Let me get this right.

Because you have to work until 65 then everyone should have to?

.....and why not?

............... then everyone should have to?.............

No sir, I worked until I decided to quit.

You either miss the point entirely or you can't think of something better to be "smart"
So sad, never mind.

Except that my reply was to ray davis.

quote:

Originally posted by Bananahead:
Let me get this right.

Because you have to work until 65 then everyone should have to?

I can retire at 60 if i wish company policy. 40 years service nice pension. I hope to work till i am 65 and rake in as much as possible to be comfortable.

Do not get me wrong at all there are lots of people who still work after 65 and i take my hat of to them.

I am now probably going to make this sound totally wrong, the tax payer has to pay in for people on pensions now. They say we are living longer. So why not work longer. I have a lot of respect for elderly people......i am now digging a hole for my self.

If i put first time offends you i appolagise.

But what makes the french so different to us?
most of the UK retire at 65 they would love to go at 60 i am sure.

Just dont hang me out to dry on my thoughts, i am sure a very large part of people inthe EU would love to go at 60. But the financial system would never cope with it.

quote:

Originally posted by Mike-B:
It looks like the French are getting into the spirit of the Soixante Huitards (sixty eighters)
Seems they do not accept (again) the "equality" part of their revolution & need to be a little bit more equal than the rest of Europe in retirement.

I just googled retirement ages for EU & USA and found the existing French age of 60 with the option to start at 57 is the lowest in EU by some margin

Belgium 65
Denmark 65
France 60
Germany 67 !!!
Greece 65
Italy 65
Holland 65
Spain 65
Sweden 65
UK 65
USA 66

That is not exactly true.
Full right for retirement is 65 actually in France.
Some workers from the public (social/state) workers may retire at 60. The new law will move the age respectively to 62 and 67.

ah so civil servants may go at 60 but all other workers it is 65 ?

quote:

Originally posted by ray davis:
ah so civil servants may go at 60 but all other workers it is 65 ?

Some so called "special regimen" may benefit for this kind of differences.
People from railways for example.

glad you can explain your system, so people like me do not go jumping to conclusions before all the facts are known.

thanks RAY

quote:

Originally posted by ray davis:
most of the UK retire at 65 they would love to go at 60 i am sure.

It's ok I didn't take any offence. I'm not that sensitive about internet posting.

I get to retire at 62. Company policy. I have a friend who is 61 so only has a year to go. He is actively trying to get kept on because he's not ready yet but I don't think that it will happen.

quote:

Originally posted by ray davis:
I have a lot of respect for elderly people......i am now digging a hole for my self.

Good forward planning but, hopefully, a trifle premature.

Gotta love the French and their penchant for mass protests.

Our retirement age is tipped to go up to 67.
When it does go up there will be a shrug of the shoulders and some letters to the Editor. Despite the desire to protest in the streets in massive numbers, we won't.

quote:

Originally posted by christophe pomel:

quote:

Originally posted by Mike-B:
It looks like the French are getting into the spirit of the Soixante Huitards (sixty eighters)
Seems they do not accept (again) the "equality" part of their revolution & need to be a little bit more equal than the rest of Europe in retirement.
I just googled retirement ages for EU & USA and found the existing French age of 60 with the option to start at 57 is the lowest in EU by some margin

Belgium 65
Denmark 65
France 60
Germany 67 !!!
Greece 65
Italy 65
Holland 65
Spain 65
Sweden 65
UK 65
USA 66

That is not exactly true.
Full right for retirement is 65 actually in France.
Some workers from the public (social/state) workers may retire at 60. The new law will move the age respectively to 62 and 67.

I'm sure the truth won't stop the jealous little englanders posting!

OK you get my vote for "prat of the week"

PLUS-1

quote:

Originally posted by bob mccluckie:

I'm sure the truth won't stop the jealous little englanders posting!

i wonder would some people on other boards call you a racist tosser?

What oddly rude posts. Very poor.

Anyway, I'm slightly bemused at the Gallic refusal to admit they're living longer and to be able to afford pensions, the options are; pay a lot more; put back the age of retirement; cull the old.

M

Whilst it remains true that more than 50% of the working population in France is in the public sector in some way, I feel that popular support for this is on the wane, and I would guess that only half of those workers, at most, support this protest, plus some private sector sympathies. In any case there is - in my opinion - little chance of anything like a majority of the French population supporting this action. The various public polls I have seen support this conclusion, although I know they're skewed, have an agenda, and being English, I don't know my way around the French media as well as I should.

The arguments for increasing the pensionable age - especially where there is disparity between public and private sectors - seem obvious to me, and the alternative (higher taxes) would be even less palatable to those on strike I am sure.

However there seems to be a genuinely-held feeling of "look how much disruption we can cause!" "How valuable does that make us?".

They have certainly caused disruption. My day, along with millions of other people's days, today has been completely ruined, business lost, appointments missed, and the possibility of a flight on Friday not happening.

But deliberately causing disruption does not prove someone valuable. It proves them an arsehole. Terrorists cause disruption (and even more successfully) and yet no-one claims this proves they are valuable, nor does it add credence to their cause. Nor should it.

I think Sarkozy must stand his ground here. It would be a first in France, but I think he must partly because there simply is no alternative (that people would accept) and partly because, perhaps for the first time, the French population as a whole do not support this action (although that's not to say they support him either).

I do slightly resent the fact that I am a French taxpayer and yet do not - and never will - have any say in the political system, even were I prepared to become, or desirous of becoming, a French citizen, but the more this goes on the more I realise that democracy here seems to be something the French tolerate rather than embrace, and will certainly abandon if it doesn't suit them.

Maybe Christophe can add his thoughts here. Mine are the views of an outsider, and here today at least it was warm and sunny to be stuck in a three hour traffic jam burning (currently) irreplaceable petrol.

I cannot understand the crass rudeness of some of the comments above - can't see what they add to a potentially interesting debate and why anybody would bother to make them. Although I don't fail to see the irony of having just called a quarter of the French population arseholes, so might you if you'd had the day I've had...

This is exactly one of the issues faced by a quasi socialist state - The EU in general and France in particluar obviously cannot print enough money to cater for the inevitable resource constraints as the population aging. The French people are basically rioting and striking against themselves. They are literally destroying their own country because they want to shorten their productive lives and are more concerned with their entitlements than their responsibilities

rodwsmith, one of the reasons I started this post was that I am intrigued by the "students" we see on the streets & the reason they are so moved to protest.

I was in Paris during 1968, an experience I will not forget for many reasons , but in 1968 the protesters were mostly real students, or at least not so far removed from being students.

The 2010 anti-Sarkozy retirement protesters seem to be made up from what look like average "state" looking workers, OK nothing wrong with that; but also a very high number from the "eco-warrior" persuasion or one of the ethnic groups most notably north African, both of which seem to be joining in in the protests for the hell of it - in UK we call them rent-a-mob - and it is they who are the car burners, window breakers & stone throwers.

It seems to me the credibility of the protest - in my view already unjustified & in reality denial - is further degraded by these people.

------

Well said Peter

quote:

Originally posted by Mike-B:
also a very high number from the "eco-warrior" persuasion or one of the ethnic groups most notably north African, both of which seem to be joining in in the protests for the hell of it

Sounds like a fairly timeless description of students to me. There may be a higher amount (number though probably not percentage) of north African origin French people now than there was in 1968, but the idea that there weren't people in 1968 who were joining in for reasons other than political dogma seems a bit naïve to me. However, I wasn't there as I wasn't (quite) alive at the time so I cannot be sure.

I was more talking about the strikers in fact, although the media here is saying that, as in 1968, it would or could take a combination of workers and students to force a change of plan by the government, as it did then.

I'm not a dreadful old tory, by the way. I do believe in striking as a perfectly valid way of making a case and the right to do it should be there for all (except emergency services etc), but in this instance there simply isn't a case to be made. Lorry drivers joining in is simply laughable - they are largely not affected as - even in France - are often self-employed, and a lot of those I saw today were not even French (or at least were driving foreign registered vehicles).

quote:

Originally posted by Mike-B:
It looks like the French are getting into the spirit of the Soixante Huitards (sixty eighters)
Seems they do not accept (again) the "equality" part of their revolution & need to be a little bit more equal than the rest of Europe in retirement.

I just googled retirement ages for EU & USA and found the existing French age of 60 with the option to start at 57 is the lowest in EU by some margin

Belgium 65
Denmark 65
France 60
Germany 67 !!!
Greece 65
Italy 65
Holland 65
Spain 65
Sweden 65
UK 65
USA 66

But this retirement illustration is only for common working class people...

It doesn't show the retirement age for the executive, top management and directors who commonly retire at 50 or 55 with big bungs and golden pensions that working people can only imagine from a lotto win.

Then there are the rich people who retire at any age they choose, and many of these Rockafeller types only work though their middle age because they enjoy ripping people off and exporting their untaxed millions to the British Virgin Islands... to where the real deficit money has gone!

and it’s still going there by the billion! ...but heck, we’re jolly British with stiff upper lip, we don't riot like the French because we have the resolve to work on though old age until we drop dead with exhaustion, so we don’t need a pension. Let those hard working wealthy people afford luxury villas, yachts, and super-cars in playground planet Earth, after all it is their wonderful world to play with in sheer luxury, who are we to argue?… us common people should put on our flat caps and pay for it for them by working harder and harder for longer and longer because we’re all in this together you know.

I may consider French citizenship one day soon

Debs

Look, let's get this straight. The only thing that matters is that my planned holiday to France this week may be disrupted. A little sympathy please.

BTW yesterday's announcements on our own pensions has left me, and apparently my financial advisor, totally confused. Doesn't look great though.

Chaps

This is all simplistic nonsense. Most people are now in full time education until they are 21 and will live to when they are in their mid eighties. The current pension schemes mainly assume that you will expire this mortal coil at 69.

Therefore the choices are obvious

1. Work longer. Surprisingly, a lot of 65 years actually want to carry on working, so that is an easy option for some.

2. Increase the contributions to make the pension worthwhile.

If you don't do the above then you either go out on a useless pension and live a demeaning old age or you get the tax payer to subsidise you until you die. The younger people may not be keen on that.

The obvious answer is a combination of points 1 and 2.

Regards

Mick